


Zitterbewegung

by DetroitBabe



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Dubious Consent, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Unhealthy Relationships, also me/semicolons, canon-typical stuff basically, extra warnings for:, gets smutty here and there too, oh also I'm not tagging the whole Blue Rose crowd but they make their appearances, the real OTP is Phil/annihilation of the soul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-21 04:39:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 42,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17036816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetroitBabe/pseuds/DetroitBabe
Summary: [ Zitterbewegung: (n.) a local circulatory motion of the electron presumed to be the basis of the electron spin and magnetic moment. From German: “trembling motion”. ]Scenes from Phillip Jeffries' life, his relationship with Gordon, and the workings of the Blue Rose.





	1. forms of fire

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a wip for too long, ever since I've scrapped "Abstractions" for parts and decided to make it into a longer, grittier, smuttier, better? maybe? version of itself. I don't care if anyone wants this to exist or not, I'm not going into the new year with unfinished stuff. Nuh-uh.
> 
> I’d like to dedicate this to M., who’s directly or indirectly responsible for 99.9% of my ideas, and to N., a childhood friend, well, more of an acquaintance really, the boy from the first paragraphs, who doesn’t know it but served as a perfect model for little Phil. Wonder what he’s doing now.

i.

He’s one of them small town boys, creatures wise beyond their age and dumb as a brick until the grave. Boys like him, they know everyone and everything, always full of secrets they’re too keen to share; never confined to their houses, their home is everywhere and nowhere, boys with backs brown from running around half-naked in the midday sun, with bruised shins and scabbed knees and dirt like rust under their fingernails, and dirt embedded into the skin of their hands, dark lines like a palmist’s diagram, a whole future written in that dirt. Like everything around here, rotten survivors, handsome in disrepair, pretty sky-blue eyes and black cavities in their teeth.

In the summer they go fishing in the river, though the river’s more industrial waste than water, it smells like tar and burns your throat like strong liquor, and if there’s any fish left in it they’re too poisoned to eat anyway; but if the trees fall down, shrivelled and dead, it only makes them easier to climb, and when they lose all their leaves they’ll look like a hand reaching out of a grave, a ghost story waiting to be told. In the winter, when the days grow shorter and the evenings come earlier, the boys will go hunting for the wickedest ghouls at the old churchyard ground, in the abandoned houses on the edge of town, singing songs, calling upon the dead and the cursed and the Devil himself, they call it ‘voodoo’, they don’t know a damn thing. Every now and then they wander off too far to be back before the sun comes down, and then they linger out there for a little longer, knowing they’re in for it for missing dinner anyway; they hide behind a barn to share a stolen cigarette, a reflected pinprick of fire glinting in their eyes, like they were the devils themselves, monsters coming home at dusk. Boys with angel faces, ashamed of innocence.

 

_A picture from a pamphlet: a little boy, and a sweet-faced angel hovering by one ear, and a red-skinned, sneering devil by the other. The angel and the devil, and you decide who you listen to, boy – and remember, God is always watching! Always watching. Did you disobey your father, boy? Did you lie? Did you think impure thoughts, as you lay in your bed at night? Did you sin, boy? Did you? God is watching you!_

 

He can feel it, a bump on the skin; his fingers move by themselves to find it whenever he takes off his pants. He can see it in the mirror if he twists his head around: a small scar on his lower back, a little to the right, just healed. The memory is also fresh, flesh-pink and sore – it only really begins to hurt now, like pain felt after the shock subsides, like a bruise blooming the day after a fight. An incident without precedence, slowly overgrowing with deformed tissue that’s swelling, stretching, rearranging around it. Something changed forever, just like that.

His father had this belt he always wore, with a big, ornate metal buckle, a pretty thing. And that time, blinded with worry turned too fast to anger, he took it off and lashed out with the wrong end, and the heavy buckle broke the skin. That was when Phillip tried to run away for the first time, and got no further than the porch. Next time he’ll have to be more careful. Tread lightly, silent and swift, like an Indian hunter in the Old West stories – invisible in the night. Slip away, slip away.

He looks into the bathroom mirror, presses his face against the glass, so close up that his vision blurs and two eyes become one. One big eye in the middle, like a Martian on TV or a comic book cover. He blinks, breaking the illusion, and strains to peek around the corner, behind the frame, further than the reflection of the bathroom, but it eludes him no matter how hard he tries, as the other him, the boy in the mirror, repeats his movements mockingly. He pushes away and stares down at him, at the Other, as if daring him to look away first. _Come on_ , he mouths soundlessly. Their own little game, and he always loses. He can’t stand the look on that face, turning harsh and ruthless when the glaze of tears wears thin. They raise their hands to meet, together, each of them reaching for the place on the other side. Phillip thinks about the rest of that mirror world, outside the bathroom walls, a tempting, unseen paradise, a terrifying land of unknown – whatever his imagination makes it. He shuts his eyes and turns away. Someday he will win. Some other day he will dare to run again, for good.

 

ii.

The mirror in his parents’ bedroom, full-length, large, stands taller than him. He’s somehow never noticed it before, but there must be some fault in it, because the reflection seems off, not as distorted as in those funny mirrors at carnivals, it’s more subtle, but there’s something wrong with the proportions, the perspective. It’s strange, in some way, but he can’t put his finger on it.

He’s home alone, the house is quiet – so quiet that the silence is ringing in his ears. He bites down on his lower lip and leans forwards a little, holding his breath, staring into his own eyes, long and hard, until he sees himself blink. For a moment it doesn’t even register, it sinks in slowly, and he feels a cold draft on the back of his neck and shivers, and looks to his left – the curtains are drawn shut, but they ripple as if the window was open behind them, and he looks to his right – the bedroom door is open too, and instead of the staircase he sees a long corridor, a dimly lit tunnel. He looks back towards the mirror, and the Other turns away, and Phillip calls after him, bangs his fists on the glass until it breaks, cutting his hands, and he stares in mute shock at the bloodied shards at his feet. He’s shaking, he bites down on his lip still like it could stop it from trembling, like that could stop him from crying. He has never been so scared in his whole life.

But he steps out of the bedroom, eventually; hesitantly, tentatively, when curiosity begins to get the better of him, and he figures there’s nowhere else to go. The air is cold and smells funny, and there’s a low, electrical hum, even though he can see no lights or machines. Nothing except bare walls, laid with a floral wallpaper, garish, but grimy and faded, and dusty wooden floorboards. If the corridor has an end at all, it’s lost in the dark – but there’s someone or something moving there, and in a sudden burst of panic he turns around and runs back into the bedroom, shuts the door behind himself and falls against it –

And it’s not his parents’ bedroom anymore. It is now a tiny room, nothing more than a walled-off extension of the corridor. In the middle of it there is a man, seated at a small table, slumped against it, like he’s fallen forwards, face first – _like he’s dead_ , Phillip thinks – his body limp and still, eyes shut, a trickle of blood dribbling down his chin – _oh God, he is, he’s dead_. The smell is stronger here, rot and ash. _Dead things_. With disgust, with morbid fascination, Phillip comes closer, and he doesn’t quite know whether to be relieved or afraid when, as if sensing his presence, the dead man stirs, taking in a wheezy breath. He raises his head with effort, opens his eyes, and Phillip flinches, taken aback. Those are his eyes, one blue, one black, unmistakable, his own eyes staring back at him from a stranger’s face. Maybe it’s the Other, his twin, his reflection, grown older in another place, another time, dead, haunting him. It does not, at any moment, cross Phillip’s mind that this might not be happening for real.

The dead man opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out, and Phillip tries to read the words from his lips – “ _wait_ ”?

“Wake –” the man finally manages to say, in a rasped, strangled voice, “wake up.”

And Phillip wakes up, the dream fading away too fast to recall in full. He doesn’t know why his heart is racing like he was running and what’s that bad taste in his mouth, like soot, like burned meat.

 

The house stinks, and he wonders why neither his parents nor grandparents have ever mentioned it. The smell isn’t strong, but it’s pervasive and never goes away; an always-present, lingering sickness. A faint stench, like smoke – not mother’s cigarettes though, more like… like a dumpster fire after the rain, he thinks, kindling damp trash. No one seems to notice it, as if it was normal. Is it something in the walls? He sometimes thinks it’s him. He sometimes wonders if other people can smell it on him.

There’s a black crack running through him and there’s something moving inside, shifting, sometimes swimming up close enough to the surface to catch its glimpse, but never breaking through. Filling up space, like roots of weeds growing between cobblestones, like cockroaches living in the dark, dank place behind the kitchen cupboards. He’s seen its face in bad dreams, never remembered when the morning comes but never fully forgotten either. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up. Maybe it’s exactly what growing up is, someone else under your skin, stronger and stronger like an urge, swelling up and rising to take you over.

You grow up and the Devil on your shoulder grows with you. _Did you sin, boy?_ You are six years old and sin is a naughty word, whispered, because when you are six words like those still hold power. You are ten years old and sin is the little lies you tell. You are fifteen years old and sin is your hand under Maisie Johnson’s skirt. You are nineteen years old and sin is what you’re thinking when you peek at Zach Watts’ ass in the school gym shower, how you’re thinking that he’s leaving town soon, and that you’re sick of hiding and waiting for a better time, so you exchange glances and you nod in unspoken agreement, and you both linger around and stay behind after everyone has left, and then you do it for the first time. Well, it isn’t your first time exactly, but it’s your first time with another boy and you didn’t really know what to expect, and it feels real good, though it hurts a little too, and Zach has to put a hand over your mouth ‘cause you’re being too loud, and he tells you that if you think you can keep it down then he can blow you instead, and that’s a sin for sure, but you want it, so you mumble an ‘okay’ and Zach kneels in front of you and takes your cock into his mouth, and that’s when the janitor comes in, and with a lot of shouting and cursing it’s all over; that much for sin.

 

They were brought to the principal’s office, who then called their parents, and the whole time Zach said nothing and avoided Phillip’s eyes, won’t talk to him anymore, and now Phillip stands in his living room, staring at the carpet; not really ashamed, barely even afraid. All the sounds are just background noise and all sensations take time to register, as if he was watching himself from behind, standing outside his own body, and maybe if he concentrated hard enough on how he’d rather be anywhere else, then he could just leave it behind. He imagines it collapsing, like a marionette with its strings cut, nothing to hold it up, it lies on the floor with long, thin limbs splayed out and a red mark welting up across its face. _You filthy little faggot,_ his father spouts out vehemently. _Look at me when I’m talkin’ to you_ , he shouts, and Phillip shrugs and raises his head, caring about all of it less and less as a thought forms in his head, an idea, a plan, a certainty. He doesn’t say a word, only stares back in silence that must look like defiance, like arrogance, because it earns him another blow. He bites down on his broken lip, drawing blood, swallowing an urge to cry – tears prickle at his eyes, but that’s just the body hurting; he doesn’t want to cry, he could laugh, because tonight’s the night, tonight he will leave, no one will stop him and he ain’t never coming back, and the very thought of it feels so damn good.

 

iii.

He stands in a motel room’s bathroom, looking at himself in the steamed-up mirror, and slowly runs a finger across it. A scar, a crack, one eye peeking through, clear, icy blue, and the rest is a blur. A voice reaches him through the closed door, high-pitched, unpleasant.

“What’s takin’ you so long?”

He buttons up his shirt, hiding the little golden cross – _God is watching you._ Well, are you still watching? He’s hiding bruised bite marks under the collar; you’d think she was a fucking vampire, or something. The woman with a shrill voice, sharp teeth and sharp nails. The scratches on his back still sting. He’s damaged goods now, swollen lips and broken skin, sore and tired and not so pretty anymore. He’ll have to take this night off, but the money should last him for a couple of days. As he turns away, he feels as if his reflection was still watching him, through the slit in the haze wrapped around his head. Asking: where to now? And tomorrow? Where are you going?

 

_The third night after the money he had stolen from home has run out, he’s walking down the side of the road and a car pulls over, the window rolls down and a man asks him to get in, says what he wants. Hands deep in his pockets, Phil’s fingers touch the handle of a switchblade, he hesitates, but nods, opens the door and slides into the passenger seat. They drive in silence until they find the nearest place to stop, a closed up gas station. He moves in closer, his body twisted awkwardly in the narrow space, working on the man’s belt buckle, pulling the zipper down. The smell of sweat and faux leather upholstery, the man leaning back with deep sigh, a golden chain around his wrist jingling against the bracelet of his watch, over Phillip’s ear as he pulls on Phil’s hair and holds him in place, turned towards him. He wants to know Phillip’s name and gets a false one, there will always be a false one, just in case, though many people won’t even ask. There’s almost a kind of affection in the softness of his voice, jarring; there is no softness in the firm grasp of his hand on the back of Phillip’s head, not letting him pull away even when he chokes and gags –_

_But then there’s a wad of cash in his pocket and it’s enough for some food, and a cheap room somewhere where no one would ask where he came from or how old he is as long as he pays upfront; a door to lock himself behind and a bed to lie in, and sheets with holes burned out by cigarette ash and a yellowed outline of a stain that won’t come off, to wrap himself in them like in a cocoon, a chrysalis sleep, praying he’d wake up as something else, something that could sprout wings and fly away, without a care_.

 

A fever dream, it must be.

It smells like home, burnt and decaying, only it’s stronger now. It’s the place, of course, but maybe it’s him too, after all. The house is like a memory, an echo of a dozen boyhood adventures, except if it’s haunted then only by some desperate down-and-outs, and even they’ve been scared off, with half of it consumed by fire and the rest threatening to collapse. He is the only ghost now, stalking the dim, grubby hallways, pissing on the dank walls and spitting on the creaky floor, and huddling in a corner, slowly crumbling into dust. Been sick, and cold, and hungry, and too weak to go out – what for, anyway, his clothes and hair are a mess, he stinks of damp and sweat, no one would touch him; but it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all beginning to fade. Maybe soon he won’t feel anything, as he will lie down, looking up, up, up into this negative image of the sky, constellations of black rot on the once white ceiling, and it will split open with a sound like thunder to bury him alive – but no, it doesn’t fall, there’s just a hole in the sky like a wound and something on the other side shifting, moving closer, looking down on him. His fingers trail blindly across his throat, along the golden chain around his neck, and the preacher’s words echo in his mind, that old, repulsive voice: _God is always watching!_ Is it Him, up there? Maybe not; wouldn’t He strike Phillip down for staring straight into His eyes? Whose eyes are those, then? Whose hand reaching out –

A fever dream, nothing more.

 

iv.

A half-familiar face, seen around for some time; handsome, nice body, looks like he might have some cash on him: worth a try. Not his usual MO; it’s better to let them come to you, you avoid dangerous misunderstandings. But something pushes him to go on, walk up to the man; boredom and desperation, and the unfounded confidence of every nineteen year-old on Earth, with swelling frustration and buzzing hormones replacing all reasoning. Steps of a well-practised dance: a sway of the hips, a tilt of the head, a wink, a low whisper: _hey, darlin’_. A kind of vanity, born from a dozen sweet words from a dozen mouths, good boy, pretty thing, they say. _Don’t you want me?_ And it looks like he got lucky, because the man notices him and doesn’t turn away, no, he approaches Phillip instead, with a nod and a smile.

You will be twenty years old in a week, days are a blur but you still try to keep track, measure the passing of time in dates from a newspaper rack. You will be twenty years old in a week, and sin is everything you are. You used to look for yourself in news reports, but you are not looked for, you are not missing because you are not missed, they’ve written you off the same way you have written them off – that’s what it’s like in your head, final and irreparable.

The man’s name is Lefèvre, or at least that’s the name he gives, on the third night they meet, when with one arm still around Phil’s waist he pulls out a badge, and introduces himself with a list of charges that could be filed against Phil if he doesn’t do what Lefèvre wants from him, so Phil reckons he better complies. He doesn’t really have any qualms about ratting out on his clients, as long as there’s an assurance of protection; he’s feeling no allegiance to anyone besides himself. And as for other requests, well, it’s the usual services. And the way he thinks about those is, it’s just the way things are; it certainly wasn’t the plan from the start, you know. But there was no plan at all and then it happened, and he swore it will never happen again but then he came around, ‘cause it was a way of getting by and he didn’t see a lot of options for himself, so why not?

And he’s managed, and it wasn’t that bad if he was careful about who he’d go with, and after every time he cared less and less. There’s no shame left by now, only an understanding that he’s in trouble, and again, it’s just the reality he has to accept, unfair as it may be. The blackmail could go both ways, of course, only who would believe him – and even if he had some evidence, he’d be implicating himself as well, and that won’t do. So, deadlock. What can you do? He shrugs and waits for what the next day brings, and in the meantime he lets Lefèvre do whatever he wants with him, he smiles and agrees with everything. _Yes, I like it, I like it when we’re together, I like it when you touch me, kiss me, when you hold me down and fuck me, and I like it afterwards, when you say I’m beautiful, when you say you love me, when you say we will always have to hide but you think I’m cut out to be your partner, and we’d at least have that._ Phil has seen and heard all that before, people who get a kick out of it or just feel better this way, telling themselves that they aren’t in it just for sex, that what they feel is genuine care and affection. A little saviour complex, sometimes: come with me, I’ll take you away from this dreadful life if you’ll be only mine. Those are the worst types, the hardest to get away from; often more dangerous than those who’d put a gun to your head to do it without paying, ‘cause you can’t give them what they want and they don’t let it drop easily. They’re the stalkers, the crazies. But even if the feeling isn’t mutual, still some part of Phil wants to believe it, wants to go along with it. Christ, it’s not like he wants _this_ to be his entire life, is it? So when that offer is made, he agrees to it as well; although it sounds ridiculous, he is being assured that it’s possible, if only he says yes. There’s tall tales, a promise of excitement and intrigue, and something as prosaic as a goddamn roof over his head. A change, from going nowhere to going somewhere, and after all he has nothing better to do, it doesn’t seem like there’s something better in store for him. He isn’t sure what strings would have to be pulled to ensure that he got that recommendation, but if it could work, than damn, he figures he deserves it. And there’s worse things one could be doing, aren’t there? It’s a good choice.


	2. golden boys against the black

i.

_When people say they could feel themselves being watched, it sounds like bullshit to him, good for a dime mystery novel at best – but damn, it’s really like that, he can feel those eyes on him._

_“My name’s Gordon Cole. What’s yours?”_

_“Jeffries,” he says after a distracted moment of hesitation. He’s almost slipped and said something else, got so used to pretending, to hiding. The brief pause must be enough to sound suspicious, at least for a pretender to the secret agent title, who squints and stares at him even more intensely now. Suddenly Jeffries feels as if something about him was not quite right, a little off, a little false, perhaps. He shifts uncomfortably and he pouts to make up for the uneasiness._

_“Where are you from?” Another simple question, simple small talk. Again, he takes a few seconds before he answers. He eventually says New Orleans, and somehow that feels almost true, like what was before doesn’t matter, doesn’t belong to him anymore. Maybe in a year or two he’ll say he’s from here, Virginia, and it will feel even better, ‘cause he’d put the whole past year away too, somewhere where he doesn’t have to look at it again._

_Those baby blue eyes still seem to be sizing him up, scanning the details of his body, his face. He wants to be somewhere else._

It’s good, isn’t it? It’s all good, the best there could be, he tells himself insistently, hands gripping the edge of the bathroom sink, white-knuckled, and a hard stare reflected back at him from the mirror. A loose strand of hair, refusing to stay neatly combed back, falling into his eyes. A cheap suit, a little ill-fitting, hanging off his narrow shoulders, and a tie, half-done, around his neck like a noose. _Christ_. Get it together. Get it together and get back out there.

Nobody knows anything about him – except all the instructors and supervisors, probably. They’re the goddamn FBI, of course they know. Don’t they? Wouldn’t he be arrested on the spot, or at least kicked out? But they look down on him, with pity or disgust, either thinly veiled; he can see it, he’s not stupid. A lot of them try to trip him up, and he has to work damn hard to not give them a reason. Show them. Oh, fuck the whole lot of them, sanctimonious, stuck up – he’s good. He knows he is. And this is just like going undercover – exactly what he has imagined he’d enjoy, ain’t that ironic? Pretending to be someone he isn’t, here, with the golden boys in black suits, God bless America, inane locker room talk and political debates over a canteen table, boring him out of his mind.

And then, as if he didn’t have enough problems, there’s Gordon Cole. They’ve been assigned roommates, and God, he hated it at first, but now he’s slowly making a begrudging peace with it, it’ll be fine once he’ll have trained himself to just ignore him. He reckons Gordon has a thing for him – wouldn’t probably admit it even to himself, but Phillip can recognize that moonstruck look in his eyes well enough. He tries to ignore that too, to begin with, he’s had enough of love and adoration, thank you very much. But then he hears some of the others brag about their girlfriends, and he thinks that since he’s got no one out there, not even in his goddamn dreams, maybe he shouldn’t write off here and now. He turns his eyes from the window over Gordon’s shoulder back to his face, refocusing on the conversation.

“...I wonder what they’ll find up there. They got all those pictures that are just rocks and dust, but maybe there’s something else too, and we haven’t found it yet.” Gordon stops, and looks at Phillip a little sheepishly, but with a grin spreading across his face. _Silly. Kinda cute_.

“What is it? Why are you lookin’ at me like this?”

“You had this look in your eyes, sort of… dreamy. Like you were looking out there at the stars while I –”

“Oh, actually,” Phillip says matter-of-factly, “I wasn’t even listenin’ to you. What were you talkin’ ‘bout again?”

 

From there on it doesn’t really take long until Phillip begins to provoke him, and Gordon falls for it every time. It’s just amusing, watching him get all flustered; and maybe, just maybe, he’s testing the waters, too. Why not? He’s feeling a bit lonely, we’ve established that, and Gordon seems like a sweet guy, if you look past the annoying parts. Hence the little games, the baiting, like when they were at the shooting range, and he said:

“Your posture’s all wrong. No wonder you keep hittin’ above the target. You gotta fix the angle your arm’s at, for starters.”

“Oh yeah? Show me how, then.” There’s a rivalry between them, tied for the best in class, and maybe Gordon takes it a little too seriously, too personally, but then again it’s hard not to take things personally when Jeffries smirks at him like that. He imagines that he managed to sound so cocky and sure of himself, but even if that was true, all his confidence evaporates quickly in this heat suddenly, inexplicably rising in his body as Jeffries stands behind him, with one arm around his waist, making him lean forwards a little, and the other under his elbow, lifting it, adjusting the aim, and breathing down his neck.

“Like this.”

Gordon fires a round but he’s not even seeing the target, it’s like he’s blacked out for a moment, and then he blinks and glances nervously at Jeffries, who’s staring at him with a half-smile – a strange, indecipherable expression. Like that woman on the famous painting, seems to see right through you, and folks have written volumes trying to figure out what she’s thinking. Similarly, Gordon once again catches himself pondering on the contents of Jeffries’ smile, the look in his eyes; and suddenly an absurd thought passes through his mind, that if Jeffries was a girl…

 

ii.

The night sky is a vast expanse of black – except it isn’t, not really. It might look like it, but only as the square cut-out in the window frame, in the corner of your eye, from across the room; but when you actually look at it, it’s not black, it’s a warm orange glow diffused across the ultramarine background. A dirty radiance which muddies the blackness and obscures the stars, a trail of pollution oozing from the big cities beyond the trees: they cannot hide, that ugly hue betrays them from afar. But it looks beautiful from the roof – don’t ask him why. It just does. And from up there, he can see all the buildings of the complex, too: _they_ are black, these angular shapes, opaque against the iridescent sky, flat and featureless, only here and there having texture and depth carved into them by the sharp lights. Every now and again, someone would climb out onto the roof – through the fire exit, that was the quickest route, up instead of down, and over the ledge where the ladder ended… Birds fly, the sun rises and sets, and young cadets do silly, forbidden, pointless things – that’s just the way things are.

And now he lies there, flat on his stomach, chin resting on his crossed arms, and takes in the view. But this meditation soon grows boring, never as exciting as the concept of it, so he carefully slips back inside. The strange feeling of unwarranted elation, a physiological reaction to an unfulfilled adventure, lingers for a while as he’s drifting off to sleep.

 

He does it again and again, although he’d be hard-pressed to explain why. Maybe to quietly rebel against the almost militaristic discipline of the place, to see how many times he can get away with it before getting caught, testing himself with a sort of half-hearted, blasé curiosity. Maybe he’s looking out for something. Maybe to begin with he just needed to escape his room, and the insufferable Gordon Cole, always hanging on his shoulder, with his silly squeaky voice and his all too keen stare and his annoying little habits and his head full of weird crap, and his baby blue eyes and pretty pink lips. Gordon lying on the bed below him, too close.

As for Gordon himself, although he’d rarely let people realize that, he seems to notice everything; and, let’s be fair, there’s only as many times someone can sneak out at night before their roommate catches on – and follows, even though usually he’s more of a stickler for rules.

“What are you doing out here? Stargazing?”

“Ain’t that more of your thing?”

Gordon shrugs. “Dunno. I still sometimes look at you and think you must be from Mars, or something.”

It was a joke that’s already gotten old, born out of Phil’s evasiveness about where he’d come from, and out of Gordon’s first-impression assessment of his looks and his “aura”, as he described it; but truth be told, he’s felt almost like it, sometimes. And even if he told Gordon how he got here, perhaps he wouldn’t find it less unlikely than if Phillip had said he’s beamed down from a flying saucer. And could you really blame him?

“Oh, please, don’t be stupid.” A goofy grin spreads on Gordon’s face, and Phil honestly cannot tell if he’s kidding or not. But then he goes serious again, and asks:

“You don’t believe in... other kinds of life? From… other places?”

There’s a gravity, a note of reverence in his voice. He is not religious, not in the traditional sense at least, but if you think about it, what is it, if not a religion? It has its rules, imposed upon the unimaginable and unknowable. It has its priests, its sages and witnesses, its congregations. Its sacred texts, its miracles and testimonies. A language of symbols, paths to follow. Visitations, angels and demons. A promise of transcendence, and a fear of eternal pain, of unspeakable evil. Out with the old, in with the same old, disguised as brand new: it’s the Age of Aquarius, and these days God comes in a UFO. Gordon is a believer, by nature, and as every believer, he wishes, even if just a little, deep down, that he could convert someone to his faith.

Phillip just shrugs. “Well, for one I don’t reckon they’d look like me. Like us, I mean.”

There’s a long pause before Gordon speaks again, a little hesitantly, coyly, although with earnest conviction.

“If you were an alien, you’d be the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen.”

“Seen many of them, then?”

“Actually, now that you’ve asked,” he starts; and with that, he distracts them both with some unbelievable story he claims to be completely true. Distracts himself as much as he can from the sight of Phillip lying next to him, propped up on his elbows with his head thrown backwards, looking up, half-listening, a slight silhouette barely defined in the dark, only catching a stray glint of light, tracing his profile, reflecting as silver in his eye, gold in his hair. “You look real pretty, Jeffries,” he says quietly, and leans in, already bracing himself to pull away, ashamed – but then Phillip pulls him closer, and Gordon puts out one hand to steady himself and puts the other one under Phillip’s head before it hits the concrete rooftop, as they fall into the kiss.

“I’m not – I mean, I – I’ve never –” Gordon stammers breathlessly, breaking away.

“Now you have,” Phillip says with a smile.

 

It becomes a fixed constant, Gordon always being at his side. He still sometimes finds it irritating, but at the end of the day, it carries a sense of familiarity that keeps him grounded, in a good way. Something sure and reliable like the turning of the Earth. Wherever they go, they go together. That’s how it’s gonna be, isn’t it?

“What are you going to do afterwards? After the academy, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I think I’d like working in the field best. Undercover, maybe.” What else; he can’t really see himself behind a desk. And it has its perks, he thinks wryly, recalling the man who got him here. Lefèvre. The memory, and the name itself, both still have a nasty, bitter taste to them.

“Huh. I want to be director.”

Phillip laughs, trying to brush off the unpleasant thoughts, the way you swat away a bug. “That so? Damn it, Gordon, I thought you wanted to be my partner, not my boss.”

“...But I do wanna stay with you.”

He rests his head against Gordon’s chest, looking out the window, at the night sky, feeling Gordon’s fingers stroking his hair, gently, with a kind of affection he can’t remember since... well, since Lefèvre, and before that perhaps never; neither his lovers nor his parents were ever particularly warm and tender. It feels better, though. Who would’ve thought it can feel so good. Almost wrong, in how odd, how nearly unrecognizable it is. Almost scary. He puts a hand on Gordon’s thigh, feeling the muscles tense a little, likely with more anticipation than discomfort, and he rubs it with his thumb, lightly, through the material of Gordon’s pants. Just that, nothing more. Like he was trying to prove to himself that it can be enough. He’d still like to sleep with Gordon, though.

 

They try sleeping together in one bed, Gordon’s lower bunk, bodies intertwined tight enough for Phillip to feel Gordon’s heart racing. It’s them being close like that and it’s the nature of the act itself, tempting fate, terrifying and exhilarating. _We’d be kicked out if we got caught,_ Gordon says quietly, and Phillip shrugs slightly. _I don’t care,_ he mutters back. It’s almost true, but not quite; still, it doesn’t ring too false. Gordon finds this attitude just as impressive as incomprehensible; with their rivalry, with how good Jeffries is, with how great he no doubt is going to be at his job, with how they’re clearly meant to be partners and – with all that, how can he risk it all and not care? It’s impossible, and then why pretend? _Don’t you care about anything,_ he asks, contrarily, faltering, _anything?_ And that’s precisely when Phillip realises it, beyond doubt, because the thought appears in his mind so instantly it must’ve already been there, it’s just been formulated now, crisp clear, in the form of a simple, plain answer: _I care about you._ And he is not ready to acknowledge it, or to say it out loud, not by a long shot, so he says nothing.

 

Gordon hears the bed creak, and the sheets rustle, and Phillip mumbling something indistinctly into the pillow as he stirs and turns in Gordon’s tight embrace.

“Where am I?” he repeats, more clearly, more forcefully this time, louder.

“What do you mean, Jeffries?” Gordon whispers, frowning. “You’re in our room. In my bed,” he adds, with a brighter, giggly note in his voice, squinting at Phillip in the dark. Eyes closed, he’s still asleep, now muttering to himself almost soundlessly again; Gordon can’t make out the words. He’ll be sure to ask Phillip about the dream in the morning; for now, he gently kisses his forehead, idly wondering what’s going on in there.

“Let me go,” Phillip groans, but Gordon concludes it wasn’t directed at him, and pulls him closer again. It’s not like they have much choice; if Phillip was to move any further away from him, he’d fall to the floor. The bed is narrow even for one person, and you can’t sit upright without hitting your head, but they make do. Needs must, and some nights the need is stronger than discomfort or even the fear of being found out.

If they make love, it’s always stifled and strained, forced quiet, hasty, before someone hears them, before someone comes knocking on the door and everything is over, just like that. They tell each other that they will stay together, believing they deserve better; the way of young men everywhere, full of life, full of promise, the world at their feet, all such silly nonsense. Even if by day they are sometimes a bit awkward or drive each other insane, it’s all forgotten night after night; Phillip’s small body just fits so snuggly in Gordon’s arms, and Gordon’s lips are softer and sweeter than any man’s Phil has ever kissed, and there, in the dark, in the too narrow bed, against the too thin walls, they can’t get enough, and they long for more.

 

iii.

Phil is the one to do all the talking, ‘cause Gordon’s too giddy with the excitement, his mind reeling from the anticipation and the imagined possibilities. He probably wouldn’t get the words straight so Phil is the one talking to the motel’s receptionist, checking them in and paying upfront with the money they’ve put together. In his head, Gordon is already well into the near future, until Phil brings him back to the present, jingling the keys to their room in front of Gordon’s face, snapping him out of his reverie like the ringing of an alarm clock.

“Upstairs, second door on the left,” he says.

It’s only halfway up the stairs that Gordon feels safe enough to talk. “So, it all went alright?” he asks in a theatrical whisper. “She didn’t give you any trouble?”

Phil rolls his eyes. “Gordon, I told ya. No one’s gonna ask what we’re doin’. We pay, we stay for a night, we leave. No one gives a damn. We’re fine.” He grins and clicks his tongue. “Even if you got that look on your face.”

“What look?” It’s changing at that very moment, from a blissful glee to something more embarrassed, reddening around the ears.

“Like you had for the whole day after I gave you head for the first time. That what you were thinkin’ about?” he quips, dropping his voice lower, and then he laughs, and puts an arm around Gordon’s shoulder, pulling him closer. “Gordon Cole, you are goin’ to have the best weekend of your life,” he drawls into Gordon’s ear.

 

It’s not just the sex, Gordon thinks, although that’s great too, it really, really is; but the very best thing is just being able to spend time together, undisturbed. Moments like this, Phil sitting next to him on the bed, hair all messed up after the night, missed two buttons on his shirt but there’s no one to tell him off for that; drinking hot black coffee and smoking his cigarettes.

It was Phil’s idea, to come here, not that Gordon hasn’t imagined similar scenarios – but it was Phil who, a couple of days before their graduation, came to him in their room and said _hey, how about we get a motel room for a weekend, after this is over. Just us, somewhere more private, you know._ Gordon only wishes it could’ve been for longer than that. He can see many more mornings like this one for the two of them, he wants them so badly. There’s no need to hurry, but there’s knowing that this one won’t last forever.

“What now?” he dares to ask. Jeffries turns to look at him, and frowns, but he seems to understand, and he smiles, but only with his lips, not his eyes.

“Now we can pull the curtains back and pretend it’s still night. And then you go back home, or wherever your director’s desk is waitin’ for you.”

“And you?”

“Haven’t figured out yet.”

“So, what, that’s it?” Gordon’s voice pipes higher, raised in more confusion and hurt than anger, or maybe something in between. One thing he’s sure of, this can’t be the end of it.

“Nah. Haven’t had enough of you yet.” He leans over Gordon, cupping his face in his hands. “I mean it,” he says. “I really like you. But who knows where we end up. I’m not making any promises, okay?” He needs Gordon to understand that Jeffries can’t promise him anything, can’t give him anything that isn’t today, in this room; at least not yet. Still, the hour is early, and there will be plenty of time for goodbyes later.

“Well, I’m here now, so are you gonna kiss me, or what?”

 

iv.

He stands by the half-open window, smoking. The thick yellow curtains are partially drawn against the last rays of the setting sun, drenching the room in this filtered, sallow light, a soft haze undulating as they ripple in a waft of air. In the opposite corner an old TV set hums quietly, casting a faint blue glow, pale staccato messages received by no one and getting lost between the threads of the carpet. Yellow and blue, drawing his silhouette with a glimmering contour, underlining every crease of the faux silk robe wrapped around his body, shifting smoothly with the slightest movement. Gordon walks out of the bathroom and for a long moment stands there, stunned, the plain and cheap motel room suddenly looking somehow unreal, and so beautiful. Phillip flicks the cigarette butt out the window, closes the curtains and turns around, the loosely tied robe parting, revealing; and Gordon lingers for a little longer, taking it all in. Caught between awe and desire, but the latter eventually prevails, and he comes up to Phillip, sweeps him up in his arms, throws him onto the bed and dives in after him, their laughter soon subsiding and turning into quickened breathing, soft caresses growing more insistent, grasping, greedy. Grab as much as you can, while you can, you never know which moment is your last. A part of him wants to savour it, slowly, make it last, but Phillip’s love is impatient, all-consuming, it burns out as fast as it flares up – he has learned that much already.

God, it’s been too long since that promised first-not first time, that one-night honeymoon in a motel room not unlike this one; and then they parted ways, too soon, an ending before a proper beginning, and Gordon simply cannot accept it. _We always knew it wouldn’t last_ , Phillip had said; he meant it as a consolation, but instead Gordon has resolved to prove him wrong. And now they’re here, in another transient moment that he knows won’t satisfy him. Phillip must’ve sensed it, noticed something in the look on Gordon’s face, because he’s straddling Gordon’s hips, putting his hands around his waist and leaning in to kiss his throat, grinding against him, arching his spine like a cat, stretching and purring into Gordon’s skin, and digging fingers like claws into his flesh –

“Wow. _Wow_. Holy –” he gasps, the thoughts, worries and yearnings of seconds ago evaporating into the hot, thick air. All disappears, the whole world narrowed, reduced, enclosed within their bodies, everything beyond that forgone and forgotten. No one else, no one has ever made him feel this way, not so deeply, so intensely. Jeffries is riding him like it’s their first time, or maybe their last, like there’s no next time, ramping up the tempo, faster and faster until they finish, and then he slides off Gordon and lies at his side, limp, utterly spent, still trembling slightly, a shiver like an aftershock. Flare up, burn out.

“That felt so good,” Gordon mutters, drawing him into an embrace, taking his hand and kissing his fingers, sticky and warm. “Damn it, Jeffries. You’re so good. Out of this world.” He lets out a breathless giggle. “How are you so good at this…  ”

Phillip tenses momentarily, just for a second; what is he supposed to say? He’s had some practice, alright. What would Gordon think of that? Would he be shocked? Would he stop loving him? Worse yet, would he feel sorry for him? But the question was rhetorical, and doesn’t ask for that kind of a brutally honest answer. He just smiles.

“You’re not half bad either,” he says.


	3. entanglement

i.

He wakes up to a feeling of dull bliss, the heat of their bodies pressed together and the warm morning light on his face. In this sleepy haze he feels Gordon stir as well, and his arm, still wrapped around him, squeezing him tight before it slowly trails down his stomach.

“Morning, darlin’,” he mumbles into the pillow, and Gordon hesitates, as if startled by waking him up.

“Oh, don’t stop,” Phillip says; intertwining his fingers with Gordon’s, he guides them between his legs to touch and stroke and pull gently, and he smiles with a groan at the back of his throat, and with Gordon’s breath on the back of his neck, quickening. With his face buried between Phillip’s shoulders, Gordon can feel the rhythmic flexing and stretching of muscle underneath the skin, just as he can feel Phil getting hard under their joined hands. But then, unexpectedly, Phillip lets go and pushes away.

“I won’t get your sheets dirty,” he says lightly, and slips out of Gordon’s grasp, leaving him turned on and painfully disappointed. It’s not even an excuse, and it doesn’t even sound like one. It’s just a way of stating something obvious: that there isn’t enough time.

“Should be gettin’ up now.” From behind him, Gordon makes a grumbling noise. “Gordon, I have to catch my flight back. I’m in the middle of an investigation. I can’t just drop everything…” he trails off, and turns around to face Gordon, touching under his chin. “Tempting as it may be.”

Only as he says it out loud, he realizes how true it is. And as he showers and dresses up and kisses Gordon goodbye, and walks out of his apartment, back into the everyday, he wishes he could have stayed.

Last night, Gordon tried to talk to him about a transfer again, and he had the same old answer at the ready – I can’t, not now, maybe in a while, after I wrap up what I’m working on, I’ll think about it. Not untrue, but not genuinely honest either. He stares at his reflection in the airplane window, the landscape falling away behind it. Asking it: _what are you so afraid of?_ He only realizes that he’s accidentally said it out loud when out of the corner of his eye he notices the man sitting next to him give him a strange look, and shift uncomfortably.

Gordon lies in his bed for a little longer, left with nothing but a trace of warmth and a stray hair on the pillow, and afterimages of Phillip’s body replaying in his mind, so much and not enough. He wonders how Phillip does it, how can he just leave like that, every time, seemingly so easily. For him, it’s becoming harder and harder to bear, those fleeting visits. Now he’ll go about his day imagining Phil was there with him. It’s a fine morning, warm and bright; they would be in his office, Phil perched on the edge of Gordon’s desk, the same way he always sits on the kitchen countertop when Gordon cooks dinner for them. Drinking coffee, discussing work and making plans to meet afterwards. He can see it so vividly, as if it had already happened; as if it could happen for real if he visualized it perfectly enough. He eventually shakes the daydream off, only to start wondering what Phillip is doing now.

 

He leans against the car, trying to light up a cigarette, but his hands are shaking and he drops the lighter twice before he manages to do it; and he breathes in the smoke in big, greedy gulps, to kill that slaughterhouse stench. Jesus _fucking_ Christ.

He was running late, stuck in traffic on his way from the airport, a road accident or some shit; he was sure the boys back in Pittsburgh won’t be too happy with him for blowing this. Over a month undercover for a chance to meet those people, and he’s late from his little weekend trip. Great. His boss is going to bite his head off for that – and rather rightfully so, to be honest.

When he gets there, tires screeching, and sees the place cordoned off, his immediate thought is that when he didn’t show up they just went right in. His next thought is, _something went wrong_. And then his partner comes up to him, gesturing at him to get out of the car.

“And where have you been?”

“Good mornin’ to you too, Earle,” he says with a falsely cheerful smile, ignoring the question, and the figurative axe hanging over his head. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?”

“You would have known if you weren’t late,” Windom retorts in his usual half-patronising, half-mocking tone that makes Phillip want to strangle him. “Go in and take a look for yourself.” He ushers Phillip towards the house with the air of a proud host of a high society dinner party. Jeffries rolls his eyes and enters the building, and promptly walks back out for a breath of fresh air. Jesus _fucking_ Christ.

It’s not like he hasn’t seen a dead body before, but this was on another goddamn level. The two brothers, heads of a mob, and three of their men were still in there, practically smeared across the floor in bloody pieces. He can imagine himself next to them a little too well, if he wasn’t saved by what suddenly appears as a miraculously fortunate coincidence, which Earle doesn’t seem to appreciate too much.

“You seem to have been very lucky, weren’t you?” he says.

Phillip squints at him, trying to read his expression. “Are you implying I _knew_ this was going to happen?”

Windom shrugs. “I’m not. But someone might. You’ll be no doubt asked to explain your absence, you know.”

“Fuck that,” Phillip mutters, dropping the cigarette onto the pavement and stubbing it out with his heel. He sighs. “Alright, tell me how this went down.”

“Our victims showed up on time,” Windom says pointedly. “We were waiting for you, wondering where you are and debating whether we should move in. We did when we heard the shots and the screams. You’ve seen what we found. No one was seen leaving the building.”

“Maybe you weren’t lookin’ properly,” Phillip scoffs.

“I assure you, we were.”

“So they did that to each other?”

“Perhaps,” Windom says with a slight smile.

“Perhaps? Or what, the killer vanished into thin air?” He’s decidedly not in the mood for the sort of conversation that’s about to come. He can already see it coming in that look Windom gives him, and he puts up a hand before Windom has a chance to speak.

“I’m not fallin’ for it,” he declares emphatically. “See, I’ve been told about that. This is how people get recruited into cults and shit. You approach me at my most vulnerable, as I have just found out I had narrowly missed being brutally murdered –” there’s another, less flippant note under the derisive, sarcastic tone of his voice. Like it only _really_ hits home after he’s said it out loud. He goes on, not giving himself a chance to dwell on it for too long. Best not to think about it.

“– and you use that opportunity to fill my head with your weird crap,” he finishes as he gets back into his car. “I see right through you, Earle.”

“Tell me,” Windom says, unperturbed, settling into the passenger seat, “you’re not one of those tedious morons who believe they know everything about the whole universe? Who think the world is safe and neatly ordered, and as small as their brains?”

“You’re not actually considering –”

“No, I am not,” Windom says slowly; truthfully. He doesn’t think there is a supernatural element at play here. Still, he has little patience for close-minded buffoons, and it’s disappointing to discover yet another of his new partner’s shortcomings, after a complete lack of maturity, class, respect, or interest in playing chess. “But I do believe you are too quick to dismiss things that don’t fit your narrow worldview.”

“Which I call ‘common sense’,” Phillip retorts. He can never quite tell how serious Windom is about all the pseudo-philosophical, esoteric bullshit he’s spouting, but he sure doesn’t fancy debating it, especially not now. They should focus on the facts, for God’s sake. Another unpleasant thought enters his mind: whoever did this, did they know he was supposed to be there? Are they after him as well? But it’s interrupted by Windom’s continued prattle.

“What if you witnessed something you couldn’t deny so easily?”

“You’ll be the first to know, so you can say ‘I told you so’.” He clasps a hand on Windom’s shoulder. “Happy? Now, I’m _beggin’_ you, unless you have something constructive to say, stop talkin'.”

 

ii.

Almost two decades after it started, Project Blue Book, a United States Air Force investigation into the existence of UFOs and their possible threat to national security, was officially disbanded, having failed to produce conclusive results.

Could it ever?

We assign names to the indescribable, measure the unknown, attempt to categorize the misunderstood. The phrase “Unidentified Flying Object” itself is laden with meaning, instead of being a proof of failure, a statement of defeat. In many minds it signifies knowledge, rather than the eponymous ignorance. Something out of nothing, the innate human thirst for answers, for design, form and truth. Something out of nothing, wisdom out of the absurd, an act of discovery almost akin to an act of creation. A watcher can feel like a maker, so much that he forgets how little he has achieved. But even an act of observation alone alters the observer and the observed, something out of nothing, and thus the watcher and the watched are connected – a bond hard to break. A repeated circular pattern, pulsating, amplified, emanating outwards – the iris of an eye, the lens of a telescope, the dish of a radar, the shape of a full moon; with these rings they are wed, for better or for worse.

They come and go, presidents and officials and superiors, but Douglas Milford’s work transcends them all – which is a noble and grandiose way of saying that he has never had too much objection against circumventing direct orders. It might seem like he has nothing now, but he has an official letter to stick into the bottom of his desk drawer (which is a disappointing, but ultimately acceptable alternative to sticking it up the bottom of the man who wrote it), and a meeting to arrange, and that is _something_ , isn’t it?

 

Phillip clicks his tongue, and bares his teeth in a cheeky smile.

“Ain’t you afraid I’m gonna sell this great nation’s biggest secrets to my comrades on Mars?”

“Jeffries, I’m serious. I want you to work on this. With me.” It’s unusual for Gordon to call him by his last name, ever since they got to know each other closer, intimately so; means he’s all business. What’s that little desperate note in his voice, then?

“Don’t be cute,” Phillip drawls, leaning in over the desk. “You just miss me.” Gordon has told him that he had to come here in person, that this was all so top-secret they couldn’t trust phone lines – excuses, excuses. A convenient justification for having him here again.

“I do,” Gordon says, almost immediately. With resignation, but not much hesitation.

“It’s been a long time.”

“I love you, Phillip.” Pause. Silence. Jeffries considers the offer. It sounds insane, but he’s been itching for a change – and every so often catching himself coming back to those last days at the academy. _We’ll stay together_ , they used to say, before they were offered positions 300 miles from each other, and “together” became a weekend in a motel halfway through or occasionally at Gordon’s apartment, once in a blue moon.

“I know,” he says, and then, after another long pause: “I’m in.” He can hear a small exhale of relief. There’s only one thing left to say.

“And, Gordon?”

“Yes?”

“I love you too,” he adds quietly.

 

iii.

Now he knows what he’s been afraid of, all this time: the permanence of it. Together at work, the interesting days and the days that drag, sitting at their desks across the room, exchanging smiles as they briefly catch eye contact before going back to the paperwork, wishing for time to speed up; and the evenings that come after, the never-ending day and night cycle of anticipation and fulfilment. Car drives filled with long conversation or silence and stolen touches. Sometimes nights in motel rooms, shared to cut the cost and to discuss case notes until late hours, and inevitably end up very close in a narrow bed. Together, together, and it feels like it will be forever. But as he settles into this new life, not without some surprise he discovers that he is content with it.

 

It’s well past midnight, but the lights in the living room are still on, and Gordon finds Phillip sitting cross-legged on the couch. There’s notes and papers and photographs laid out on the coffee table, but he’s not even looking at them, just staring off into the distance.

“Are you going to sleep, sweetheart?” he calls from the doorstep, and walks up to Phil when he doesn’t respond.

“Hmm?” Phillip murmurs with a few seconds’ delay as Gordon leans in from behind, laying gentle kisses on his shoulder, neck, jaw, before looking up, trying to follow Phillip’s line of sight.

“What are you looking at?” Through the window he can only see the darkened landscape of the city, black and blue and yellow, overlaid with the semi-transparent reflection of the room, and their faces.

“I was just thinkin’.”

Gordon slips his hands under Phillip’s shirt, hanging loose and undone, running them down his chest, feeling his skin under his fingers. Can’t talk without touching, almost like he needs to reassure himself that Phillip is really here, with him; it’s been over a year since they started working together, and practically living together as well, so often they’d spend a night with each other at one of theirs’ place, and yet there’s still sometimes that small, sudden feeling of amazement: Phil really is here with him and it’s so fantastic, it’s unbelievable. He has to make sure it’s real. He can feel Phil’s body, but he can see from that distant look on his face that he’s been miles away, and that’s no good.

“I’m going to bed,” he whispers in his ear. Phillip sighs theatrically.

“Well, I can’t let you do it on your own, can I?”

He turns around, and putting his arms around Gordon’s neck pulls himself up, a crooked smile on his face. He tends to drift off like that sometimes, and whenever they’re together, Gordon is always there to pull him back to Earth, worried or simply craving his attention. It used to irritate him, but now he welcomes it, and returns the affection. He thinks about that too, sometimes. How he’s grown softer, in a way; but he’s happy, they both are, and there will never be a regret. Even as it all goes to hell, he will say it was worth it, for the stretched-out sweet moments, when there’s less and less of that feverish haste in their lovemaking, because there’s time at last, all the time in the world, to take it slow, explore each other, knowing it doesn’t have to end anytime soon.

 

“What were you thinking about there, sweetheart?” Gordon asks, idly playing with a strand of Phillip’s hair. Looks down at his face, his head resting on Gordon’s lap, half-closed eyes, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. Phil passes him his cigarette and Gordon takes a long drag. He’s only smoked a couple of times before they met, but now he’s took a liking to it; it’s the smell of Phil’s clothes, the taste on his mouth, how could he not like it?

“It’s like when I was a kid,” Phillip says after a pause; Gordon isn’t sure if he’s answering the question, or just carrying on out loud with something else that’s on his mind right now. “There was this place out on the edge of town, in the woods, they called it the devil’s tramping ground. There were stories, footprints burned into the grass, someone going missing twenty-or-so years back. So, obviously, everyone had to go check it out, all the neighbourhood kids lining up for eternal damnation. And what do you know, we never saw a damn thing. We kept stomping around and shouting and singing songs to wake the devil up, and he never showed up. But it was never proof enough, you see? It just meant we didn’t have the magic, that maybe it had to be full moon or you had to say a certain word, or something, and if we kept trying, we could make something happen. Went on and on. We said we gotta see it to believe it, but I guess we already believed pretty damn hard, didn’t we? If we kept making excuses for why it doesn’t work. When do you stop and decide that you’ll never see a proof, ‘cause there’s no devil sleeping underground?”

“You’re talking about Blue Book.”

He shrugs, and they fall silent again, with Gordon pondering on Phillip’s words. He’s certain that he’s made the right decision, asking Milford for Jeffries to join them. He could see it since the academy that Phillip had it in him, that need to _know_ , to pry out a secret and crack it open; it made for a good argument to get him on board, and perhaps promised a success. Not that Gordon wouldn’t do everything in his power to work with Jeffries anyway, but him being good at his job just made it easier to justify. And with Phillip here all clicks into place, like it was meant to be.

“I’m so glad you’re here with me,” he says, wrapping an arm around Phillip’s chest; mindless late night talk. “Do you know how much I love you?”

“Yeah,” Phil replies with a grin, and puts a hand over Gordon’s, rubbing it with his thumb.

“Don’t worry, I’m not goin’ anywhere,” he adds as Gordon tightens the embrace. He pushes himself up, but only to drop his cigarette into an empty glass on the nightstand, and then turn over, straddling Gordon’s lap. He licks his lips and moans under his breath when Gordon’s hands slide down his back and clench around his ass, and he leans in closer for a reprise, in that lazy time after sex when they’re both thinking they should maybe get up and take a shower, and then go to sleep, but they stay in bed for a little longer, tangled up in each other and in no hurry to break away. The air is still heavy and hot with their breaths and sweat evaporating off their bodies, but you can’t tell until you go out of the bedroom and come back, and suddenly you have to open the window to let in some fresh air you didn’t even know you needed; but for now they kiss each other breathless one more time.

 

iv.

He stirs, half-awake for a moment between one dream and another, and feeling a waft of cold air on his back, tries to pull himself closer to Gordon, into the warmth in his arms, only to discover he’s not there.

“Gordon?” He blinks and looks around, bleary-eyed, and pushes himself up – and sees a thin streak of light falling through the slit between the door and the floor. He lies back down, thinking that maybe Gordon just went to the toilet or to get himself a glass of water, or something, but minutes tick by and he cannot hear a sound, so he eventually gets up too. He finds Gordon in the living room, sitting on the couch, staring at the wall – or through it, at nothing in particular, at something inside of himself, maybe.

“What is it, darlin’? What are you doin’ here?” He walks up to Gordon and sits down next to him, taking the coffee mug – still half-full and already cold – out of his hands, and putting it down on the table. And then, as he does so, Gordon snaps out of it, suddenly turns to Phillip and wraps his arms around him, and squeezes tight, burying his face in Phillip’s chest.

“Darlin’? What’s wrong?” Phillip asks again, pulling away and cupping Gordon’s face in his hands, and looking into his eyes, wide-open and red-rimmed.

“I had a bad dream,” he says quietly. “About you.”

“A bad dream about me? Am I so scary?” Phillip smiles slightly, but it quickly fades back into a frown. Gordon shakes his head.

“I saw you, walking through a forest. You were holding a gun, like – like a rifle, ready to shoot, like you were hunting or something. You came into a clearing and stood face to face with a deer. A huge buck. White, and almost translucent. It looked…weird. Now I think it maybe wasn’t a deer at all. But it – it had your eyes, Phil. It had – that thing, you know, just like you. Felt like... it _was_ you, in some way. And you shot it, right between those eyes.” Gordon raises a finger to his forehead; his hand is shaking slightly. “You killed it, Phil. It was you, and you killed it.”

“Shh. It’s alright. It’s alright,” Phillip whispers softly, drawing him close, back into an embrace. “It was just a dream.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Gordon protests. “Don’t you ever have dreams that feel like… they’re something more?” he asks after a drawn-out moment of silence.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Do you?” Gordon insists. Phillip considers his answer for a while. Should he answer at all? He doesn’t like talking about such things too much, ‘cause he’s never sure where he’ll end up once he starts, and there’s places he’d rather not let Gordon in. It’s better this way, for both their sakes, he tells himself. But just a few steps, maybe. He sighs.

“Yeah, sometimes… they feel so real. I mean – even after I wake up, it still feels as if… I’ve really been there. As if I went somewhere, and it was a place that exists somewhere, outside of my head, and I really… travelled there. Doesn’t mean it happened for real.”

“What place?”

“It’s… corridors. Endless dark corridors. Sometimes rooms. Shabby, dirty.” He closes his eyes. “Smells like… a few days old arson scene. There’s a sound, humming, like a generator going somewhere behind a wall, and static in the air.”

“And?” Gordon presses on, his own worries put aside for a moment. “Is someone there with you?”

“Maybe. I can never remember anything else.”

“What do you feel, when you’re there?”

Jeffries shrugs. _I feel scared. Lost and scared_. He doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t matter, does it?

“You don’t believe it’s real?”

“Of course I don’t.” He sees Gordon grimace at that. “Come on, darlin’,” he says. “I’m here. I’m alive. I’m real. Can you see me? Can you feel me? _This_ is real. I’m _here_.”

There’s something wrong, like something has been unsettled, something heavy hanging in the air, unsaid and not fully recognized, and he has to get rid of it, the best way he can. The only sure-fire way he knows. He slides down onto his knees, running his hands down Gordon’s thighs, and looks up, licks his lips and grins. Something inside him protests weakly, _you should keep talking instead_ , and Gordon protests too, but he soon gives in, lifting his hips slightly, letting Phil pull his pants down. Phillip can feel Gordon’s fingers threading through his hair, softly stroking his head, _like a mother caressing her baby_ , he thinks, and it’s a thoroughly fucked up metaphor for someone currently balls deep in another man’s mouth, but that’s what it feels like, and he suddenly hates it, not knowing why, and just prays for Gordon to come faster so that this can end. And when it does, he just wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and gives Gordon a quick kiss on the cheek, avoiding looking him in the eye, and disappears into the bathroom, and for a moment, absurdly, it looks like he’s not planning on ever coming back out.

He spits and coughs and washes his mouth out, and looks at himself in the mirror, sleepy eyes forced awake, heavy and bloodshot. And for the first time in what feels like eternity, he looks at the door reflected in the corner of the frame, and tries to peer through the frosted glass pane, to catch a glimpse of the room behind it, the one on the other side, and sneers with contempt, sees himself grimace as if he’s tasted something bitter. What’s wrong with their perfect little life? Can barely stomach it anymore. They do, after all, when you’re a kid, tell you to not eat too much candy or you’ll get sick; it’s just like that. Meant to be happy forever, but forever is a big and scary word. And Gordon scares him a bit too, lately, with his weird moods and bad dreams and his premonitions of doom, drawing him even closer to Phillip, grasping to never let go. Scares him and bores him – is it even possible to feel both at once? It’s grating on him, that’s for sure. Maybe he’s let it go too far. But it’s been too good to think of as a mistake; he doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t want it to end, not quite; or does he?


	4. we didn’t have a name for it until –

i.

It’s a little odd, perhaps, but of all the things happening there, the first detail he registers is the smell, and for a split second he stops dead in his tracks, wondering why it seems so familiar, before his training kicks in, and he can rush into action again, look around and see. There’s a woman lying on the floor, trying to get up, bleeding from a wound in her stomach; it’s Lois Duffy, he recognizes her face instantly from the photographs in the files. He kneels by her side and tries to hold her, but she writhes, and wails, and claws at the air and his face with broken, chewed-on nails. He grabs her wrists, tries to calm her down, wants to help her, though he knows it’s hopeless. He looks at her and meets only her wild, wide-eyed gaze,  fixed somewhere over his shoulder, to the end staring at the woman who killed her. And then she shudders – _no_ , _tell it how it was_. She shifts, swells and flickers like an image on a damaged tape, with a crackling, crunching sound that makes Phillip sick, and she freezes.

“I’m like the blue rose,” she says slowly, with effort, her face rearranging into a semblance of a smile. Fingers still locked around her wrists, he can feel her pulse weakening – she stiffens, eyes and mouth open, immobile – once again she ripples, like a wave, like a Wiggers diagram just before it flatlines, like the last flash on a screen turned off, like a whiff of smoke – and she is gone. She slips through his fingers, she oozes out between the atoms of reality; her blood on his hands, the echo of her voice still ringing in his ears, but she might as well never have been there.

He turns around, looking at the other woman, and flinches, only now realising she had the same face, more identical than an identical twin. He thinks, _why did no one tell me she had a sister_ , and then he has a more ridiculous notion that Lois Duffy somehow teleported to stand behind his back, alive and uninjured; only he knows she’s been standing there the whole time, flanked by Gordon, both of them staring dumbfounded at Phillip, or more likely at the empty space in front of him where a body should have been.

And then Lois Duffy – the only one left in the room now – looks up, opens her mouth and screams: a long, garbled, inhuman, head-splitting screech, the sound of reality torn apart. And in that moment all the lights in the motel flicker; they go off simultaneously, for a second, and when they turn back on, everything looks exactly as it did before, but it will never be the same again – they marked a transition, a transmutation. Back in the room, Gordon staggers and collapses as if punched in the gut, and Phillip will later wonder if they have heard the same thing. Maybe not. Are a sound and its echo the same thing? Yes and no; and the former is much louder and clearer, and you might just be able to understand it.

 

He goes through the motions on autopilot, without thinking; he can walk and talk but his mind’s gone completely blank, still frozen in that moment of shock, a slowed-down crash, the empty space before fear, before any emotion, before consequence. The woman doesn’t do anything when he leans over Gordon, lying unconscious on the floor, to check up on him, doesn’t struggle when he handcuffs her to the radiator in the corner before running down to the reception to call for assistance. She’s still there when he comes back, she hasn’t moved an inch. Doesn’t say a word when they come and take her away. Someone asks Phillip if he’s alright, and he nods, yes. The blood staining his shirt and the carpet isn’t his own. He can’t begin to explain.

He volunteers to stay and wait for the forensics to arrive, mainly because he feels more like sitting down where he stands than walking, or worse yet, driving. He only goes as far as out of the room, and sits down on the three steps leading up to the door, trying to light a cigarette, but his hands are shaking and the lighter keeps slipping in his fingers. The first coherent thought he proudly manages to form, in what feels like eternity, however nonsensical and irrelevant, is: it should be dark. Perhaps rainy, too. The neon sign – _Motel Olympus_ in stylised, pseudo-Greek lettering, and a yellow lightning bolt – set against the black sky, and reflected in the wet tarmac. Yes, that would feel right. Very… _noir_. But in the light of day, a bright, sunny afternoon, the place is stripped of any vestiges of mysterious allure. Just a shabby two-storey building, a dirty, nondescript block half-hidden in the trees; the neon sign towering over the parking lot turned off, unattractive even to insects, interested more in the pile of rubbish spilling out of the bins on the far end. A poor setting for turning the whole world upside down.

He can’t tell for how long he’s been sitting there, or for how long that new forensics guy, Rosenfield, has been standing over him when his words finally find the way to Jeffries’ brain.

“What happened to your face, Phil? Were you arresting a feral cat?”

He touches his scratched cheek and stares at Albert dumbfoundedly.

“Got your tongue, too?”

“What?” Phillip’s voice is a drawn-out drawl, as if even a four-letter question took aeons to formulate.

“The cat.”

“What cat?”

Albert rolls his eyes, but looks concerned at the same time – something only he could manage.

“She’s gone,” Phillip mutters, mostly to himself. Albert raises an eyebrow, and pushes past him onto the doorstep, peeking into the room; there is a puddle of blood on the floor, already soaking into the carpet, but no body. _She’s gone_.

“What the hell happened here?” he asks, staring at the bloodstained sleeves of Jeffries’ shirt.

“I’m like the blue rose,” Phillip answers, if this might count as an answer, quietly.

Albert thinks of slapping him to make him snap out of it – not in anger, but the way you pat someone’s face to wake them up, only a little harder. But it seems highly inappropriate, so he just squeezes Jeffries’ shoulder, which is probably inappropriate too, but at least couldn’t be counted as an assault.

“Are you okay?” he asks softly. Phillip blinks, and manages to focus a bit better.

“I’m fine,” he snaps sharply, at Albert’s tone as much as at his own lack of professionalism.

“Well, since we’re back on Earth, can you tell me what happened, and whose blood is ruining that lovely carpet in there?”

Phillip swallows and nods, forcing himself to think clear. He runs a hand down his face, wincing as he pulls on the scratches. And he tells Albert what happened, and it feels as if his words solidify those events into fact, as if he makes them real himself, and in his mind it’s unforgivable.

 

ii.

He stands outside a hospital entrance, huddled in the corner of the doorway, the cold 3 a.m. wind blowing cigarette ash back into his face; that’s the stinging in his eyes, nothing else. He’s arguing wearily with a nurse who keeps pointing at a no smoking sign and telling him that in fact, he could just go home. No, he ain’t going anywhere, he’ll stay until Gordon wakes up and Phillip can visit him. He wants to be with him, ask him how he’s feeling, tell him it’s gonna be alright, and so on, that’s one thing. But he also has to know –

“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you? Seen her disappear.” Gordon grabs his arm and stares at him, searching, pleading, looking for the same confirmation. Phillip has thought it would be a consolation, but now he discovers he maybe would have preferred to have imagined it all. Gordon’s voice is unnaturally raised, the doctors said he’s somehow gone nearly deaf; it’s high-pitched, unpleasant. Phillip snatches his hand away, feeling so angry all of a sudden, not sure why.

 

He lets Gordon stay in his apartment after he’s discharged from the hospital. Busies himself making coffee, making food, covering up this strange, irreconcilable bitterness with layers of sickly sweet icing of fussy kindness. Stalling, putting off the inevitable, he still can’t figure out where to start. A part of him can’t stand it any longer, wants to force Gordon to answer all his questions, explain everything; a part of him doesn’t want to even think about it.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” Gordon asks once again, breaking the silence. In a literal sense, there has been no silence; there was noise, clatter and chit-chat. But there has been silence where there should have been sound, and it was louder, and he’s shouting above it, only with a flat note of weariness in his voice, bordering on disappointment. It’s a vague question. It’s precise, a shot right into the bull’s eye, and entirely self-explanatory. And there’s no answer.

“I gotta go to work,” Phillip says instead, and leaves, earlier than usual.

 

He begins to talk to himself. Not out loud, but in his head – almost constantly. He’d sit down and have a long, serious conversation with himself about whether or not talking to yourself really is the first sign of madness. About whether he’s gone crazy, or the world has, or both.

With Gordon, he mostly argues. He has to shout anyway, to be heard, so it only makes it easier, that dirty alchemy of transforming any emotion into anger and resentment. He doesn’t want to talk with him about Olympia, because all that Gordon has to offer is an echo of his own fear and fascination, and on top of that, the one thing Phillip really can’t forgive him for: that terrible reassurance. Gordon keeps telling him that he hasn’t gone mad, that it had all really happened, when he’s been dreaming of a universe in order, where the unreal stayed so, a safe fiction, where all of it was a delusion. A recurring nightmare where something was wrong with him only, but he keeps coming back to it, and for a long time he wants to never wake up. But the longer he’s been thinking of what he had witnessed in that motel room, the more blurred his feelings become. No distinction between revulsion and reverence; all definitions have been broken and twisted, and he has to reinvent and learn them all over again, and Gordon can’t help him with that either. He has to do it himself, for his own sake; map out this new, different world, or he’ll get lost in it and he won’t ever find his way.

 

“I can’t explain it, Albert,” he says. It comes out almost comically defensive. Almost like pleading, wishing he had an answer.

“Don’t ask me,” Albert replies with a shrug, “I only cut ’em up. And there’s only one here.”

He nods towards a body on the slab. The body of Lois Duffy. A body of Lois Duffy, found dead in the early morning hours. Killed herself awaiting trial, for a murder she swore she didn’t commit; although, Jeffries thinks, if the _other one_ was the killer he’s been tracking, then she was real, then Lois Duffy killed her. It. Whatever. Guilty nonetheless. But does it count? As Albert has pointed out, they could hardy present it in court, and as far as he could say there was no victim anyway. That’s what the official report will say – the perp’s in the morgue, end of story. But from Jeffries’ perspective, the case is far from closed. It’s one of _those_ cases, only so far none of them have turned out to be true, and it feels like not what he’s agreed to. They weren’t meant to be real.

“She said, _I’m like the blue rose_ ,” he notes absentmindedly.

“Romantic,” Albert mutters dryly.

 

Who do you turn to for answers? Not Gordon, that’s for sure – can offer little to none, that much is already established. What’s next, then? Pulling files from cold cases, pages from Milford’s Blue Book, visiting and re-visiting all the self-proclaimed occultists, psychics, alien abductees, hoping that one of them, eventually, turns out to be the real deal? It’s absurd and it’s pointless and it’s the only thing he can think of. And, well, isn’t that what he was supposed to be doing, anyway? Gordon should be happy, not that Jeffries is doing any of it for him.

Only for himself, no-one and nothing else. His loyalty to the Bureau as an institution has always extended only as far as necessary to keep the job; beyond that, he’s never really cared. He accepted that he had a knack for it, he appreciated the opportunity to do something that occasionally felt worthwhile and good; but could that be all that kept him here?

He’s beginning to believe in a plenty of things he would’ve laughed at not long ago, but he still doesn’t believe in destiny. And yet, only now, chasing an answer to an impossible question, it might be the closest he ever comes to a calling, and it seems to stir up something inside him, a lifetime-long fascination, and a years-old feeling that something in him is pulling, pulling, inevitably dragging him towards some deeper mystery, and now he’s driven to the edge of an event horizon, the black hole looming over him, there’s another world beyond it in all the stories, but even as he begins to lose his footing, pulled ever closer, he strains and he still can’t see what’s on the other side, and he has to see, and he’s so damn scared of it.

 

iii.

He slips into the apartment quietly, slowly closing the door and watching out for creaking floorboards, before wryly realizing that he probably needn’t bother. He notices the lights in the living room are on, and sees Gordon slumped in his armchair. He could sit like that for hours, just staring off into space. Phillip’s aware that the accident must’ve been hard on him, sure, and in the beginning he tried to keep Gordon in the loop, brought his case reports home and tried to discuss them together, but he just doesn’t have time for that anymore. Not now. Maybe Gordon should find himself something to do on his own.

“Where the hell have you been, Phillip?! It’s almost 4 a.m.!”

Oh, so he didn’t doze off while he was doing his brooding. Jeffries sighs. “Sorry, mother,” he mutters under his breath.

“What was that?”

“You need a better hobby than sittin’ on my couch and waitin’ for me to come to you,” Phillip retorts sharply. Loud enough to be heard clearly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that maybe my whole life doesn’t revolve around you. It would do you good to stop expectin’ that.” With that, he turns around and walks into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. That’s what he needs, to be left alone. But Gordon doesn’t understand, he never did. He always wants something for himself. Have the cake and eat it, grab a piece and then another until there’s nothing left, and he’s oh, so surprised that the plate is empty.

Gordon lies down, but can’t fall asleep. He feels powerless. He feels a lot of other things too, but that’s a big one. It comes with a kind of dark irony: they’re living together, for real, at last, full-time, you would’ve thought it was the one thing left to complete his happiness, but somehow it’s not the lovely little life he’s imagined for them. He definitely didn’t imagine sleeping on the living room sofa instead of in Phillip’s bed. One thin wall apart, and they’ve never been more distant. And then the fear, the sense of impending disaster, it never went away, even as the expected cataclysm has passed and they have emerged on the other side; he begins to think that maybe the worst is still ahead of them. He tells himself that maybe he’ll try to talk to Phil tomorrow. Maybe he’ll actually follow through with it. Maybe this time Phil will want to listen to him.

 

He can’t sleep, and for a while he lies still; he feels that even if Gordon wouldn’t hear him turning in his bed or pacing around, he’d know it somehow, he’d be at the bedroom door in no time at all, like a dog scratching and begging to let it in, and Phil might even give in, but any scenario that he can imagine of what could come after seems absolutely awful to him, so he’d rather make no sound. But he’s getting himself all riled up, thinking about those things, and he can’t lie still no more. First he sits up; his hand, trailing along the thin lines of light falling through the blinds, finds the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table, he lights one up and falls back against the pillows. Then after a while he gets up and walks over to the window, looking out onto the street, and by the time he’s done smoking he’s made up his mind. He goes out to the living room.

It looks like Gordon has dozed off, but he’s always been a light sleeper, and even more so when things have been tense. He blinks his eyes open and props himself up on one elbow, turning to Phil, who’s hovering uncertainly halfway between the doorstep and the couch. Phillip slowly comes closer, and squeezes in next to Gordon, clinging to him, with his face against Gordon’s chest, but Gordon gently lifts his head and stares at Phil’s face, half of it dimly illuminated by the dawning light filtered through the curtains, half of it in shadow. Blue eye, black eye, a wet glint on them both.

“Where have you been all night, sweetheart?” Gordon asks, trying to speak as quietly and softly as he can. Phil faces away from him, towards the door, both eyes now black and they won’t meet Gordon’s unless he forces it, his hand still pressed against Phil’s cheek.

“Look at me, Phil. Where were you?” For a long moment he doesn’t reply, not because he feels guilty or ashamed of anything, nothing like that, but simply because he doesn’t know what to say, where to even start.

“I got lost,” he says eventually, his voice a little shaky. If there’s a double meaning there, Gordon can’t tell whether it was intentional or not – but then again, does it matter?

“Where did you go?” he insists. Phil sighs.

“Just… shut up, okay? Just – just hold me,” he says. Reaching some kind of breaking point, long looming over him, and he’s been fighting against it but now he gives in, just a little, just for a moment; he lets go. He curls into Gordon’s arms and Gordon goes quiet and holds him, burying his face in Phil’s hair. It smells faintly of smoke – not cigarettes though, something more unpleasant, like something burning, something rotten. Something weird, he can’t really identify it. Phillip’s skin feels cold, he’s shivering, wearing only a loose undershirt, and Gordon pulls the blanket over his shoulders.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he tries once again, and Phil still doesn’t answer. Instead, he simply stays there for a while, in silence, and then eventually slips out of Gordon’s embrace, pushes him away and without a word vanishes back into his bedroom. Gone with the daybreak, and Gordon could very well consider it all a dream, so oddly heartfelt, so uncharacteristically honest this moment was, even though it offered no confession, no explanation, and no resolution, none of the things he’d want from it. And in the morning, Phil acts as if nothing has happened, deflecting conversation with silence and touch with stiffness, the distance between them growing larger, every morning Gordon wakes up to find him further away, only this time he realizes that he can’t find it in himself to be angry anymore, or even hurt beyond a dull ache, the kind that he could get used to.

The kind that he will get used to.

 

iv.

Phillip dreams.

He knows he’s dreaming. He had never trained himself to recognize it, not like Gordon says he has; the knowledge is simply there, the way you just know things in dreams. Not in all of them, not in the ones that don’t matter, the ones where you’re back at school and you're late for the maths test or you're in a bathroom and your teeth are falling out. Only in this place, whenever he visits it, he immediately knows it for what it is. A dream. A recurring nightmare.

This time, the corridor has many doors. _Like a hotel,_ he thinks. He walks slowly, and listens. He’ll be here until something happens, and he gets scared and runs – might as well get his bearings before that, it's always the same place but it's never quite the same. This time: doors to the right, doors to the left, noises coming from behind them as he passes each one. A whisper, indistinct. Laughter, maniacal, cutting through him, sending a shiver down his spine. A crackling of electricity, spluttering, rabid, like a power station about to blow. Music, slow and dreamy, the kind you want to dance to. A gunshot.

A cliché. He feels it with a second’s delay. He stumbles, puts out one hand against the wall to steady himself, and presses the other to his stomach, against the searing pain. His fingers stain red, he looks down and sees that his shirt is soaked through with blood. His head spins, his legs buckle under him. The corridor has many doors. _Like a hotel,_ he thinks. _Like a motel._ A part of his mind is still looking for clues, analysing. Room number eight, just next to him. Where the shot came from, he thought so at least, but the door’s closed and there’s no bullet holes in it. It looks familiar, though. Room number eight. What else?

In a way, this is just a dream about work, the way everyone has dreams about their work, and it’s only the nature of the job that makes it what it is: a nightmare, messy and painful and incomprehensible. Maybe. Or maybe it's not so simple.

This time, when he tries the door, it opens, and just as well – he doesn’t feel like he’d be able to break it down. This time, there is a man, lying on the floor, trying to get up, bleeding from a wound in his stomach. He raises his arm and points at himself, standing on the doorstep – no, behind him –

Phillip closes the door and turns around; with effort, he pushes away from the door frame and crosses the corridor to the other side. Room number eight. Again. Maybe this time, there will be an answer. He wonders if he will simply wake up, when he dies inside the dream. He reckons he doesn’t have long before he finds out. Until then, there’s only one purpose, one reason to hang around: the possibility of an answer. He pushes the door open.

The room is even darker than the corridor, its corners lost in shadow; but there’s one thing that he can see clearly enough, close to where he’s standing. A table by the wall. On top of it, a crystal vase; inside it, a single rose, its petals an impossible, electric blue.

 _I’m like the blue rose_ , he thinks, and then he says it out loud. _I’m like the blue rose_. His voice sounds strange in here, words drawn out even more than his usual twangy drawl; and distorted, like a bad recording. _I’m like the blue rose_. He says it like a spell, like a wish, waiting for the moment in which he understands, in which he finally knows, the way you just know things in dreams – but it never comes. He collapses, and the darkness closes in on him, cold and empty.


	5. bloom

i.

He knows he is being watched.

Or maybe not. Maybe the things he’s seeing, the things he _thinks_ he’s seeing are all just what’s waiting for a sleep-deprived and chemically altered brain when it gets too close to the edge. It’s been too many hours; he’s not counting, but he can feel it. His heart’s thumping in his chest like it’s about to break through. Something out there wants him, it’s watching him like a vulture, just waiting. Or maybe not. He could just let go and sleep – but the thing is, he really doesn’t want to do that, ‘cause then he’ll dream again.

It's not always about Olympia, at least not directly. He doesn’t always go through the slow death routine. Doesn’t always see himself dying on the floor, another one of himself killing him, waiting for him in a motel room. Sometimes it’s just how it used to be before that, him running through the dark with no sense of direction, ‘cause some things never change. The perpetual, tale-as-old-as-time nature of the nightmare makes him think that it’s not about Olympia at all, not specifically, it’s just what his mind dresses it up as to make it at least partially recognizable; and everything he’s learned in the waking world leads to the same, inevitable conclusion. Not a singular anomaly, but a new set of rules. It’s always been there, even if he only comes to seeing it now.

Oh, he hates having been wrong.

 

People have once believed that the last image seen before death becomes written on the inside of a person’s eye. Perhaps it is true, except not only in death; during his life, too, if what he sees is powerful enough, it will stay superimposed over his vision for ever. And it might repeat again, and again, over the years, until one day he will hardly be able to see a world beyond the ghosts. There’s already one, and it won’t go away.

He has tried to understand, this new smoke-and-mirrors world, but it wasn’t that easy. No great arcane knowledge to be bestowed upon him, both him and Gordon knew nothing; he’s starting to see that now, after hours of searching, after days and nights spent on futile movements and fruitless endeavours, but there’s a long way still from realising it to accepting it and he’s not even facing the right direction. He’s still waiting for a revelation, it has to come to him, doesn’t it? After days upon days of reflection. Maybe he is a reflection, like she was, a reflection who took his place, a negative swapped for him when his world turned upside down. Because it doesn’t feel like him, not the person he remembers being. A reflection – not in a mirror, that’s too sharp and defined. In water, washed out and distorted, things swirling underneath, swimming under the skin. In glass, see-through and brittle – an urge to break it to touch the real him, trapped, phantom-like, on the other side. But you can’t, it’s an illusion, a reflection is a separate person but it’s the only one who remains. That’s how it seems to work, right?

He drifts.

We are born with our brains split into halves, and this crack never stops growing, extending deeper and further until it breaks our souls in two. A mirror cutting sagittally, and each of us is two of us, and neither is a reflection or they both are. They are one, but always separate. Each half is a subcritical mass of dreams and hopes and fears; one day, they will briefly meet, fuse into a one of him for a moment before exploding, _and all the king’s horses_ …

 

Gordon has moved back to his own house, and Phillip hasn’t visited him in some time. When he isn’t working – which these days also includes those extracurricular activities, endless and fruitless private investigations that he’s at least free to carry out without Gordon being around – he spends most of the time curled up in his bed, thinking, sometimes reading, looking for a solution and coming up with nothing. Hiding away in a world of its own, one that he doesn’t want to let Gordon into. When he finally does, it’s one final act of denial, a futile, pitiful attempt to turn time back to the good old days. They cannot seem to find each other as lovers, though, not like they used to be, but at least they seem to move a step further away from hate.

That night, in Gordon’s arms, he dreams again of endless empty rooms, colourless and dark, and somewhere at the end of the corridor is someone who can answer all his questions, give everything meaning and purpose. There has to be. He wakes up and doesn’t remember how the dream ended.

 

He’s always talked in his sleep, ever since he was a kid. He knows that well because it’s been pointed out to him a lot; back home, when he gave his mother a good scare a couple of times, saying weird shit and occasionally even wandering around the house in the dead of the night, or at the academy, which in turn he’s sure of because Gordon would always bring it up over breakfast. Not because it startled or annoyed him, being too loud or something; no, he just took an interest in it. Ran well with his UFO theories and his ghost stories, and Phil invariably laughed and sighed and rolled his eyes, forever unsure as to why Gordon seemed to insist on making rooming with Phil look like living in the goddamn Twilight Zone.

But now – he doesn’t like admitting it, even to himself, but he catches himself wondering if there might be something in it after all, if Gordon wasn’t onto something all along. Maybe there’s really something about him, in him, always with him like a shadow, except it’s curled up deep inside and only sometimes it stretches out and flexes and fills him with its presence. And when they’re having some torn-up, mix-and-match conversation over breakfast, made up of empty small talk and tiptoeing around any meaningful things they could have been saying, unless something like an “I love you” or “remember when” or “about last night” slips out and they’re both suddenly pretending to be utterly fascinated with their eggs or coffee – when Gordon mentions he’s heard Phil talk about something strange, first time he shrugs it off as always, perhaps out of habit. The next few times he seems to consider it carefully, in silence. One more time will be the last straw. He still won’t say anything, not out loud, not to anyone, especially not Gordon, but he’ll make a choice, to follow a thread wherever it leads.

 

ii.

It feels like he’s been marked for something; more than just a witness, with the blood of a ghost on his hands and something out there can smell it, and is coming for him as he runs headlong to meet it. It’s all so clear now. He looks in the mirror, seeing through the surface. He can imagine it, like an autopsy, peeling off the layers: the skin, stretched taut and thin, delicate. The meat, stringy, knotted ropes of tendon and muscle. Ribcage cracked open, diaphragm cut, all the innards spilling out, let them – dig deeper, to the core. A black crack, curtains pulled apart, a door ajar, and a hand reaching through. Take it, let it take you, collapse in on yourself, like a dying star, like she did, reality torn and closing in around her, a wound healing. Follow, she’s already there, waiting for you. She will show you everything you’ve ever wanted to see. Lead you through the maze of dark corridors, you won’t be lost anymore. Have faith. Follow. It has been within you all along, don’t deny it, don’t fight it.

He knows what to do, now the only thing left is to figure out how. He has some ideas about that, too. Slowly, like in a trance, he walks back into the living room, to the phone on the wall, chooses an old number he still remembers, and waits, listening to his own heartbeat pounding in between the dial tones.

“Earle? It’s Jeffries. I need your help.”

 

A motel room, not dissimilar to that one in Olympia; maybe even a more grubby and seedy place, but that’s precisely what he needs. No questions asked when he checks in, no cops called no matter what happens. Whatever happens. He still isn’t sure what exactly is supposed to happen, but if he’s got any common sense left, it’s telling him to keep that shit out of his own house.

Preparation. He pushes the bed into a corner to clear some more space, sets twelve candles on the floor in a circle and lights them one by one, slowly; the measured pace helps him focus. That, and the cocaine. Which isn’t a part of the recipe, but it doesn’t change anything, does it? To be honest, Windom didn’t seem entirely clear on the instructions himself. He didn’t need much coaxing to give them to Phillip either; perhaps he was eager to test them out on someone else than himself first. Only asked him to get it all on tape, so Phillip sets a video camera on the bedside table; from this angle it should get most of the room. As he works, a radio comes on next door, loud enough to hear the words of the song, vibrating, trance-like:

_And if you feel that you can't go on_

_And your will's sinkin' low_

_Just believe and you can't go wrong_

_In the light you will find the road_...

He hits the overhead lights off, turns the camera on and, out of the frame, helps himself to another line of white off the nightstand, before walking over to the middle of the room and sitting cross-legged in the circle, with his gun at the ready, near his hand. Just in case. He’s not sure how is it supposed to help if... whatever could happen happens, but it makes him feel a little better. He smiles to himself, a nervous, twitchy smile. He used to laugh at Gordon’s ghost stories and roll his eyes at Windom’s esoteric deliberations, and now he’s in some middle-of-nowhere place, strung out on coke and insomnia, ready to (metaphorically, for now) spill some blood onto the chalked pentagram and chant the Devil’s name. Funny how people can change.

_Hey, babe, I know how it feels 'cause I have slipped through_

_To the very depths of my soul, yeah_...

There’s something eerie about how it sounds filtered through the wall, though maybe it’s just a side effect of the drugs, and the echo of words rolling off his tongue, at first he cannot even tell if he’s really saying them; maybe he’s only thinking them, louder and clearer than his own thoughts, filling his mind to the brim until the spill out of his mouth and fill the room and drown him, gasping for breath and shivering in their reverb –

 _Light, light, light, in the light_...

– and then the song next door bursts into static, and he listens. White noise, snippets of news reports and interrupted music, noises woven into a chaotic pattern boring into his brain and turning into a voice. It’s Windom’s voice, as he copies the words and symbols into Phillip’s notebook: _it is... an offering, of a sort. An offering and a call. An invitation, you might say. Répondez s'il vous plaît_. And then it’s another voice, distant, half-recognized but impossible to recall or understand, like a dream you begin to forget as soon as you wake up, it’s calling from above and he stands up on shaking legs, dizzy, and just as he thinks he can grasp it the voice cuts away. He reels, feeling sick, stumbles to the bathroom and throws up into the sink, violently, over and over until there’s nothing left but bile, and he sinks to the cold hard floor and it gives away beneath him, opens, and he’s falling through the dark, the eyes of God looking down on him as hands reach for him from down below, tearing at his flesh, and none of that is real, of course. He will check the recording later, and it will show only static, he’s probably set it wrong. He has achieved absolutely nothing.

 

iii.

He was mistaken about that. Something has heard him, followed, entered. It’s inside him now, burrowing through him, leaving woodworm trails like scrawls in an incomprehensible language. Maybe it was already there, and he only prodded it awake. He lights up another cigarette, but it doesn’t quite manage to kill that other smell, stronger now, nauseating, like an arson scene – over-grilled meat, burnt hair, burnt upholstery, hot metal and smouldering wood; he reeks of it. He’ll take it with him wherever he goes. Run away. Watch your step; it waits for you to slip. Don’t fall asleep, it will take you, turn you inside out and you’ll devour yourself. Run away. But what if the things you’re running from and the things you’re running to are one and the same? What then? Your life closes in on itself, a perfect circle, as you swallow your own tail like a bait. The circle is a tunnel with no light at the end. The circle is a door. Where does it lead to? The world on the other side of a mirror? The circle is a barrel of a gun. A way out, perhaps.

 

Gordon still has the spare set of keys, Phillip has never took them from him or changed the locks. He has tried phoning earlier, planning to remind Jeffries that wherever he disappears off to every night, and whatever for, he’s still supposed to come to work in the morning, which he hasn’t done in four days in a row now, and Gordon was running out of both excuses and patience. Phillip responded as Gordon was just about to hang up.

“You won’t see me again,” was all he had said to Gordon’s furious ‘where are you’s. “And if you do, it won’t be me.”

Gordon wasn’t sure how to interpret that exactly, but it definitely didn’t sound good, and with a sinking feeling of dread like a pit in his stomach he came to see him as fast as he could, and he has let himself in without even bothering to ring the doorbell. The apartment is dark, save for a streak of light across the floor, a trail to follow, leading to the bathroom door, slightly ajar.

“Phillip?” He can hear no response, so he slowly pulls the door open –

Phillip’s standing with his back to him, but Gordon can see his reflection in the mirror, his worst worries coming true, it hits him like a punch in the gut as he takes it all in. The blank stare. Lips moving, muttering to himself almost soundlessly, too quietly for Gordon to hear. The gun pressed under Phillip’s chin, and a finger hovering over the trigger. Gordon stands there, stunned, until the shock gives way to a different kind of fear, ushering him into action.

“Put it down, sweetheart,” he says, words catching in his throat. Phillip seems to falter for a moment, goes quiet, they catch eye contact briefly in the mirror; but then he stares down at himself again, pushing the barrel against his throat. He’s shaking, and Gordon wants to reach out, touch him, but is too afraid to startle him. Would he be fast enough to try to knock the revolver out of Phil’s hand? Would he even dare to risk it?

“I can’t do it,” Phillip says after a long moment, his voice breaking into choked sobs as he begins to cry, his whole body quaking as if about to fall apart. “I can’t do it.” Gordon exhales slowly, only now realizing for how long he’s been holding his breath, and takes a cautious step inside.

“That’s good. You can put the gun down now.” Phillip shakes his head.

“Coward,” he whines. “Always was. Always looking away.” He glances around, briefly, and then turns back to the mirror. Suddenly, he screams and lunges forwards, and hits the mirror with the barrel of the gun, shattering it.

“Stop looking at me!” he yells, hysterically, landing one blow after another, pieces of broken glass clattering into the sink and onto the floor. “Stop looking at me!” The words turn into inarticulate wailing, his body slacks and falls against Gordon’s as he grabs Phillip and drags him away, trying to wring the revolver out of his fingers; they give easily, limp and slippery with blood. He empties the cylinder, tucks the gun behind his belt, and sits Phil down on the edge of the bathtub, looking over his hand.

“You cut yourself,” he mutters. “Let me see that.” He finds some bandages in the cupboard, and dresses it the best he can, clumsily, having to hold Phil and keep him from keeling over in the meantime.

“Let’s get you to bed, huh?” he says, cupping Phillip’s face in his hands. Looking into his eyes, puffy and red, with a thousand yard stare fixed over Gordon’s shoulder. Gordon wipes at the tears running down Phil’s cheeks, and hugs him tight, and then picks him up in his arms and carries him into the bedroom, lays him down on the bed and sits next to him, feeling light-headed from all of it, the shock, the fear, the relief, the worry.

“Why –” he starts, and cannot find the will to finish the question, but it’s a question in itself; it’s clear enough. “Why?” He looks around; the room is a mess, stale air, windows closed and curtains shut, old clothes discarded on the floor, a mouldy coffee pot and an overflowing ashtray on a chair pulled up to the bed. There’s stuff pinned to the wall, notes, blurred photographs and hasty drawings, words, numbers, symbols, comments scribbled over them or even directly on the wallpaper. He knows it’s about Olympia, it must be, at least in Phillip’s mind, but he can’t make any sense of it. He turns back to Phil, curled up in a foetal position, whimpering quietly, and reaches out to gently stroke his head.

“Oh, baby,” he says softly, “what’s happening to you?”

And he feels a stinging in his eyes and he cries as well, there, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over; the pain is physical, visceral. He realises how little he knows, and that he understands even less. They’ve made love in this bed countless times, they’ve sat here and talked for hours, but the memories of not so long ago seem as distant as if they belonged to another lifetime, another person altogether, unreal, a page in a book read once, years before now. He kicks off his shoes and lies down too.

“I love you,” he murmurs, drawing Phillip into a protective embrace. He’s let him slip through his fingers. “Come back to me, sweetheart. Stay with me. Please.” Phil turns over in Gordon’s arms, onto his back; wipes his face with his sleeve and fixes his gaze on the ceiling.

“Are you gonna fire me?” he asks.


	6. entanglement (reprise)

i.

He comes to Gordon’s office in the early afternoon, when Gordon is already climbing up the walls, imagining all the worst possible reasons for why he’s late and hasn’t been returning calls; but there he is, just after lunch hour. He keeps up a façade, Gordon has to give him that; but it’s a façade nonetheless, and one not too hard to see through: tired eyes, like he didn’t get much sleep last night (and to be fair, neither did Gordon, ruminating over today’s meeting until too late an hour), crumpled yesterday’s clothes, a strained languid pose, forced, false. He still looks better than last time they’ve seen each other, and certainly better than that afternoon when –

Gordon closes his eyes and shakes his head slightly, as if trying to shake off the image that’s come unwanted into his mind, Phil playing Russian roulette with his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Maybe it’s too soon, for either or both of them.

“How are you holding up, Phil?”

“I’m good,” he mumbles through the cigarette in his mouth, lighting it up and sitting down on the edge of Gordon’s desk. “Now, what’s so important that you’re pullin’ me out of my leave?”

“Milford called. He’s been going through our reports from Olympia.” He notices Phillip wince at the word. “The unofficial ones, you know. Cross-referencing them with old files. He’s convinced we’re onto something big here.”

“Okay,” Phillip says with a small shrug.

“He’s got money for it, Phil. We can get more men and resources. Set up a proper task force.” Despite that heavy cloud hanging in the air between them, he cannot hide the gleam of enthusiasm in his eye.

“And I suppose I’m in it,” Phillip says, his voice flat, seemingly emotionless.

“I want you to lead it.” Phillip raises an eyebrow. “Phil, you were… you are the best goddamn agent I’ve ever worked with. And you’ve been on the project from the start. You were in that motel room – no, listen to me – you were there, you’ve seen it. It should be you. And me – I’ve got other things to take care of. I’ve got a promotion coming. Deputy Director of the CID. It’s gotta be you.”

“Well, congratulations, then.” Gordon stares at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. “I’ll think about it,” he says, sliding off the desk and turning around to leave, but Gordon stands up and reaches out to put a halting hand on his shoulder.

“Phillip, wait. I know that you still want to crack it. This is your chance.” Phillip sighs and curses inwardly. Yes, he does. He feels like he won’t rest until he knows. But some days he feels like he won’t rest until he leaves it behind. The old divide between an urge to run towards something and an urge to run away from it, and ripping at the seams between those opposing forces; so the only way to stay whole is to let one of them win. And damn, he already knows which one it’ll be.

“I’ll call you back tonight.”

 

_“Why don’t you come over, and we’ll talk more about it?”_

Gordon can’t help but smile to himself. It was a good answer, better than he dared to hope for. First of all, it was practically a “yes”, ‘cause if Phillip was going to say “no” (which Gordon didn’t believe he would, anyway), he’d just say “no”. But secondly, no less importantly, if their past could be any indication, it promised a very pleasant evening that would have little to do with work.

He hears a shouted “come in” and lets himself inside, and finds Phillip pacing around the kitchen, smoking. He’s still wearing the same white suit pants as earlier, but besides that he’s stripped down to an undershirt, and his hair is more tousled, messy curls catching the soft glow of the low lights like a halo. He looks like a ghost, unquiet and ethereal. Like an angel… just beautiful, running out of poetic metaphors. Yes, Gordon very much dares to hope.

“Hey, Gordon, want some wine?”

“What kind?” Gordon asks, a little absent-mindedly, still stunned by the contrast between that nervous, uncomfortable meeting in his office and… well, whatever is happening now. The atmosphere is decidedly different, although he still feels uneasy. Phillip leans over a cupboard and takes out a bottle, bringing it up to the light and examining it critically.

“Red,” he says, and smirks. “Yeah, I still don’t know shit about wine. Sorry.” He pours two glasses, almost full, and raises his in a toast. “Cheers.” He grabs the bottle too, and walks over to the living room; Gordon takes his glass and follows.

“Phil –” he begins, but Phillip puts up a hand to stop him.

“Gordon, you were right,” he says, and then laughs. “And you know how hard that is for me to say.” Then suddenly he’s serious again, like he’s flipped a switch, and he stares at Gordon with unsettling intensity, standing over him, fidgeting, playing with the silver bracelet around his wrist.

“Should’ve gone blind, maybe. Would be fair.” Gordon frowns. “‘Cause I… I think I saw... what you heard,” Phillip continues; he speaks slowly, pausing between words, as if each of them required an effort, or a careful consideration. “Only I didn’t really see anything, I just – it was like, like a glimpse, too quick to register properly, but… a glimpse of – of where she went to. And someone else…” he trails off. He doesn’t know how to even begin to explain what he’s felt then and ever since. He runs a hand through his hair, shakes his head and sighs.

“I want to – I need to find out, like you said. And I reckon I should try doing it your way this time, seeing where... where mine got me.” He takes a swig from his glass and sits down on the sofa, throwing back his head and closing his eyes, and he feels Gordon gently squeeze his shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re ready to come back?” he asks. Phillip nods.

“Yeah, so let’s talk details.” Another eyeblink change of pace, of mood. Gordon glances at him, trying to read how truthful the answer is; and concludes it’s as good as it can ever be. He reaches out for his briefcase and takes out a sheaf of papers. He’d rather have Phil take it slowly, but he knows that once he’s set on a course, he won’t be reasoned with. And after all, it was Gordon who called him; although judging by how quickly Phil stopped feigning disinterest, he couldn’t wait to see the end of his forced vacation. He just wishes he could be certain about this.

“Windom Earle was your partner in Pittsburgh, right?” he asks after a long pause, seemingly out of the blue, as Phillip looks through the documents in silence. He must’ve mentioned the name at some point, probably as an explanation for a particularly nasty mood he was in that day. There’s a fresher memory in his mind, but of course Gordon can’t know anything about that –

“Yeah, why?”

“I was looking through some of the old Blue Book files, and the name popped up. He worked for them before we were at the academy.”

“What do you know,” Phillip says flatly, raising an eyebrow.

“You don’t seem very surprised.”

Phillip shrugs, and finally looks up from the file he was reading, doing his very best to appear nonchalant and entirely unbothered. “If you’re asking for my opinion about getting him on board, it’s this: good agent. Hell of an asshole. Probably not right in the head. Could be useful, but don’t put him in the same room with me. The rest is your call.” Gordon considers this answer.

“Although,” Phillip adds, “if I’d be his boss? That would be funny.” He laughs. “Oh, what about Rosenfield? I want him on the team.”

“Do you think he’ll say yes?”

“I’ll talk to him,” he says, and pours them another glass.

“I’m driving,” Gordon protests.

“No, you ain’t,” Phillip replies with a smile. “Oh, look at your face. Yeah, you heard me right. To Blue Rose.” He downs his glass, then takes the emptied bottle, tilts it over to drink up the rest, the last sip on the bottom, and licks off a drop running down the bottle’s neck. The imagery is so suggestive that Gordon feels a hot flush on his cheeks.

“Blue Rose,” he mumbles.

“I’ll open another one,” Phillip says, getting up. “And Jesus, Gordon, you can at least take that tie off, you look like you’re about to choke to death. You’re not on a staff meeting.” He winks, and goes back to the kitchen.

 

They approach each other cautiously. Gordon recalls the last time they were together, not long after he’s moved out of here. It was strange, neither good nor bad. Better than the fighting, or avoiding each other, which probably was the worst of all; but still worse than ever before. It didn’t feel right. It felt like when you’re an adult, and you buy that candy you used to love as a kid, and you don’t know if the recipe has changed or _you_ have changed, but it doesn’t taste as good as you remembered it, and maybe all that nostalgic longing was better than the sickly aftertaste it left when fulfilled. No wonder it was more of a one-time thing. What they had in the past has slipped out of their hands, it has slipped and crashed to the ground and they’ve just been standing over the broken pieces in awkward silence, and Gordon reckoned (or maybe just wished) that they both wanted to put them back together, but they were too scared to touch them, ‘cause they had sharp edges on all sides and might’ve cut pretty nasty. He sometimes wasn’t sure if he was more afraid of Phillip or for him, but at the end of the day he has waited for his move all the same. And now it comes at last, like an exercise in trust, Phillip falling back into his arms, with tilted head and neck exposed, an animal gesture of surrender, and Gordon accepts it gratefully, with reverence. In this moment, it almost feels like the old times; maybe they can get back there for another chance. They’ll work together again and be together again, make up and make love and everything will be alright. Perhaps foolishly, he dares to hope.

 

ii.

Gordon begins to think that perhaps Phillip was too perfect a man for the job; he gives it everything, and maybe it’s too much. In a way, he knew this would happen, and from a professional point of view, maybe even counted on it. From a personal point of view, he’s worried. Phil appears to have straightened out, but something’s still unsettled, precarious. There’s a sort of tension to him, invisible, but almost palpable, threatening to snap and break. Gordon remembers his words, that day he tried to shoot himself: _you won’t see me again. And if you do, it won’t be me_. He sometimes gets that ridiculous, awful, unshakeable feeling that it has indeed happened, no, is still happening – slowly, atom after atom, Jeffries is being replaced with someone or something else, less and less familiar.

He remembers how they used to make love in those earliest days, frantic and insatiable; but then there was a deep feeling that he can’t find now, so there’s cold comfort in the fire of their incidental encounters. They’re a warped echo of the past, the same old game, except now it’s just this, a game, and not even played to win, just for its own sake, to tease and run and chase. It’s not that Jeffries acts differently, quite the opposite; he acts pretty much the same as always, but he _is_ so different. Who is this impostor, and how dare he keep insinuating himself into Gordon’s life, taunting him with a parody of the man he loved? He walks past Gordon swaying his hips, and it’s a reminder, and it’s an empty promise; he smiles and winks but those lips don’t kiss and there’s a cold blue spark in those eyes, electric, bright and dangerous: don’t come too close or you’ll get hurt. It’s still the same contradiction between force and tenderness, but it’s like he’s been turned inside out. The way Gordon used to see him, there was a strength underneath the apparent fragility of his body, his delicate skin, his soft voice whispering sweet words; it showed through in glimpses, a glint in the pretty eyes, a steel grip of slender fingers. But now it’s the other way around, a callous exterior, a cold and hard shell, and Gordon is looking for a crack to pry it open, to reach Phillip’s heart or at least see that it’s still there. But for all the manifestations of love, or at least simple lust, Phillip feels almost lifeless, like merely an effigy of a man. It’s the worst when they’re making love, it’s like making love to a machine, the mechanical rhythm of his movements, the engine-throbbing pulsating in his groin. The hollow reverb in his voice as he begs Gordon to not be so goddamn delicate, to pin him down with all his strength, all his weight, go harder, make him squirm, make him feel something, let it be pain if nothing else, because anything less can’t cut it anymore.

“I used to think I know you so well,” Gordon says, one of those days, a morning after, over the kitchen table, staring into Phillip’s profile, half-turned away. It’s still a pretty sight, in spite of everything; but he used to look like a model and now he looks like a sculpture, still, chiselled in marble; dead. “Now it’s like I can barely recognize you.”

Phillip only sneers at that. “What do you want from me?” he retorts, turning around sharply. “Recognize what? Who do you think I am? Your roommate at the academy? You think I’m still him? You think I can be? He’s gone, Gordon. Dead and gone.” He puts two fingers up to his head, mimicking a gunshot, and sees Gordon’s fists clench. The corner of his mouth twitches, pulled up into a crooked smile, mocking, taunting. Cruel.

“What, you want to hit me? Come on. Do it.” Gordon stares at him incredulously, and shakes his head.

“What’s wrong with you,” he says, stunned, as Phillip laughs.

 

It simply doesn’t work anymore, not like it used to; but even as he knows they’ll never be those moonstruck lover boys again, still they find themselves together time after time. There’s an inevitability to it, like their movements have already been drawn by someone else’s hand, like something bigger than the two of them was pushing them along those tracks, apogee to perigee, over and over again. Maybe this is all there’s left of love, a bull-headed refusal to let go. This, and the simple fact that he could never resist the sight of Phillip’s body. He knows it so well, every inch of it, he can bring up its image in his mind anytime he wants – but it tends to remind itself uninvited, too. He stares at Phil pacing around the office, sees the pent-up energy in his movements, and can’t help but imagine – remember – Phil walking like this around the house, wearing that damned old silk robe that always exposes more than it covers up. So when it happens for real, when he sits on the edge of Phil’s bed, still fully dressed, hands folded in his lap, comically prim and awkward, and watches Phil striding into the room, he can’t get his eyes off him, and that’s nothing unusual yet. Past that point, nothing’s right, nothing’s like it supposed to be, even as it keeps happening the same way every time, like some strange ritual, the jerky, unnatural motions of what was once, briefly, a perfectly synchronised dance. Now it goes like this: the waiting, during which Gordon tries – and fails – not to think about why and what for does Phil need to take all this time, so when Phil comes in he’s already pretty darn worked up, and he gets up to his feet and grabs Phillip roughly by the arm, twisting it behind his back, buries the other hand in his hair, pulling his head back, kissing and biting and sucking on his lips, his neck; looks up to see a shadow of a grimace, and falters.

“Does it hurt?”

“Isn’t it supposed to?”

“Just tell me if –”

“Oh, f – fuck’s sake,” Phillip mumbles, on a shallow breath, his eyes closed. “Don’t stop.”

Don’t stop, so he doesn’t, he pushes Phil onto the bed and eventually undresses as well, and it’s gotta include the earbuds since there’s nowhere to put or clip on that little box they connect to, and after all these years it still feels somewhat disconcerting, it’s upsetting and unnerving, but what Gordon wouldn’t like to admit even to himself is that it’s a perfect excuse not to talk, and he can’t decide if that’s more of a curse or a blessing. What’s there to talk about, though, in a moment like this? They’ve always seemed able to read each other minds, haven’t they? To know what the other wants more than they know it themselves. They know what they want, they know what the other wants, don’t they? Don’t they?

And in the end it always comes back to love, aching and sweet, and a kind of sadness, and a silence where he knows there wouldn’t be any words even if he could hear them well. He reaches out and gently caresses Phillip’s face, and sees a twitch pass through it like an electric impulse, and he doesn’t stop until it turns into a soft smile.

 

iii.

“Your hands are shaking,” Gordon observes.

“Hm.” Phillip examines them for a while, frowning slightly, and then looks up again and smiles. “Maybe it’s hatchin’,” he says, in that drawled, humming voice of his, voice like hot rubber, stretched-out and sticky, a voice that puts a taste of something burned in Gordon’s mouth. He doesn’t understand, but he knows something’s wrong, he can see it in Phil’s eyes, a vacant gaze that’s somehow so penetrating at the same time; he didn’t know a nothingness could be so overbearing. He feels like an astronaut cut from the ship, falling away into space, in those too drawn-out pauses. Phil leans back, taking a long drag on his cigarette, and then slowly blowing out a cloud of smoke, half-obscuring his face.

“The way I see it, you know,” he says, “is that this –” he gestures up and down at his body – “is just a shell. Like – like an egg, and what’s inside each one of us is chewin’ its way through, all our lives, workin’ to break the shell and fly up to heaven.”

He pauses, squinting up at the ceiling, so intently, as if an answer to every question in the universe was written there.

“That’s why you go to hell when you kill yourself,” he continues, matter-of-factly, like what he’s saying is obvious to him, like he’s had a chat with God and He explained to Phil the inner workings of His creation. “You break the shell before the little thing knows how to fly, and it comes crashin’ down.”

Gordon suspects there’s a kind of sincerity in those nonsensical ramblings; perhaps it’s the most honest Phil has been with him in a long time. Revealing what’s going through his mind, just like that, and it’s exactly what Gordon wanted, but now his first instinct is to shut it down, he doesn’t want to hear it, because it doesn’t feel right, it’s weird and hurting and he never knows what to do with it.

“I don’t like it, when you talk this way,” he admits.

“Well, tough,” Phillip rebuffs. Gordon sighs. A truth for a truth, then.

“No, I mean… I’m worried about you,” he says, and he sees Phillip’s expression harden too fast.

“No need.”

He suddenly decides he preferred that other Phillip after all, the one with trembling hands and glass marble eyes and a voice like molten metal, falling in heavy drops, to the one with folded arms and feet stacked up on his desk and a face like steel; because the former was at least real. Because he fades away so quickly that Gordon begins to doubt if he has ever even existed in the first place. There’s only this one left, cold and harsh, and a silence this time pregnant with nothing. They’re alone in the office, at this hour, when everyone’s already gone home, and there’s spots where the cameras don’t look, where one could steal a kiss or a touch, but it’s impossible now, in this silence. The only thing Gordon can do is awkwardly clasp a hand on Phillip’s shoulder and say, without conviction, ringing painfully false:

“That’s good to hear. I’ll see you tomorrow,” and leave. _It better be._ It better be no need to worry. No reason to care.

As for Phillip, it’s like he’s felt too much, he’s had his share and used it up, splurged it all on countless sleepless nights, spent on love, spent on sex, and spent on crying alone, on the bitter late hours when your whole life replays in your mind like a movie and it shakes you up too much. Spent on anger, spent on pointless wanderings, spent on fear, on praying for the dawn to come. All spent, and now he’s left with nothing. Simply can’t afford to feel anymore, and every time he tries he’s coming short, so he tries to stop trying.


	7. what shape is a secret, what colour is a mystery?

i.

Green is the colour of life. Here, it is vibrant and deep; dark, but soothing. The trees stretch out towards the horizon – no, they _are_ the horizon, the only one that they can see here. The woods climbing to the mountaintops and rising up to meet the sky: a small blue-green snow globe universe, and a town in the vale. Anything outside already seems distant, it just as well might have been in another world. They drive by the population sign on the side of the road slowly, careful not to break the glass as they pass over, inside.

Green is the colour of envy. This place longs for something it can’t have, wants to be something it never will. It looks up to heaven, but hell bubbles underneath its skin; look too close at the pretty varnish and see it’s blistered and cracked. Something else is there, unseen like a worm nesting between a flower’s petals, unspoken like cruel words on the tip of the tongue, smacking against the teeth bared in a sweet smile, unheard like muffled violence locked inside four walls. It’s a place like any other.

“It’s a very… special place, here,” Carl says to the man’s back as per his request they move to a quieter corner. The man has introduced himself as an FBI agent, but doesn’t look much like one: his shirt looks like a cluttered window display in a florist shop, and the regulation black suit is two sizes too big; his face lacks the stern blank expression of a government official, and he keeps shifting in his seat like he can’t wait to be somewhere else.

“It was good of you to come here,” Carl continues, joining him across the table, and accepting the cigarette offered like a token of goodwill. “although I still think you’re all parts of the same clique. No offence.” The FBI man laughs.

“Oh, I don’t know. Agencies and departments fight all the time.”

“Yeah, like an old married couple,” Carl mutters. “At each other’s throats all day, but at night they still share the same bed, and when they die, they’ll be laid in the same grave.”

“Why am I here?” Phillip asks with a sudden change of tone, leaning back with his arms folded. Carl sighs.

“Look, what they printed in the paper is what I said, and I meant every word of it, but I’m not gonna keep talking to you about lights in the sky and noises at night until I sound like an idiot and you can dismiss all of it. We just want to know what’s happening on our doorstep. And don’t try to sell me that story about a weather forecasting facility.” Phillip puts on a smile, earnest, charming and disarming, and Carl doesn’t buy that for a second either.

“What would you like me to say?” he counters Carl’s sceptical reaction. “That the United States Air Force has a landing base for UFOs on your mountain?” There’s a pause, and he taps his pen on the table, not-so-subtly drawing Carl’s attention to what he’s doodled on a napkin: a pattern of three triangles. Carl’s expression hardens. He can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else underneath this facade of genial mockery, but he’s not sure what to make of it.

“Anything else you want to talk about?” he asks sternly. Phillip hesitates. There’s a noise from across the floor, as if right on cue; he glances in its direction, frowning, and then turns back to Carl.

“Not for now,” he says eventually. “Unless you’d like to show me around your neck of the woods.”

 

There is no pain, no odd sensation, no warning sign; Gordon reaches for his coffee and his left hand shakes violently, and for a moment he just stares at it as it moves out of control, knocking the cup off the counter. The loud clink of porcelain on porcelain as it hits the tiled floor stirs him, and he grabs one quaking hand with the other, looking up at the girl behind the bar, his face mirroring her startled confusion. The spasm passes, leaving him only ever so slightly trembling.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and those are the right words, but it sounds more like an exclamation of surprise than an apology. The latter comes later, with a weak, flustered smile of embarrassment, _I don’t know what happened, it’s never happened before_ , with leaning to pick up the broken pieces.

“Oh, leave it, sir, I’ll clean this up,” the waitress stops him, “you’ll only cut your hand or something –”

“Well, we can’t put _your_ pretty little hands at risk, can we?”

The girl scoffs and shakes her head. She thinks about talking back, but the man's flirtatious tone is pitifully half-hearted, and his gawking stare feels like only an echo of that blank deer-in-the-headlights expression from a minute ago, that her bobbing blond hair and tight baby blue dress just happened to get in the way of. And soon he loses his interest in her anyway, instead turning his attention to the man talking to Carl in the booth across the floor.

He has missed it. When was the last time they worked a case as partners? With his poor hearing, at first, and then the promotion as well, he doesn’t go out into the field that much anymore. But they used to be quite a team, back in the day. Even when still at the academy, he knew they would be. He remembers falling in love with Phillip – he  has been so fascinated by him from the moment they met, it seemed like there was no other way but to fall for him, and what an apt turn of phrase – Gordon feels like he’s fell, soared and plunged down and hit the bottom and couldn’t pick himself up. He remembers the nights they’ve spent on assignments like this one, and tries to imagine the same happening here. They’ve booked separate rooms, but one of them could still knock on the other’s door tonight. He wants all of it back so desperately. Once again, as always, he makes quiet wishes.

 

ii.

Phillip says he’s only come to discuss something in the LPA files; an excuse, Gordon thinks, still hoping against hope. He can’t even concentrate on what Phillip is saying, because – to not be overheard, another handy explanation – he’s muttering into Gordon’s ear, leaning so close his lips brush against Gordon’s skin. And eventually Gordon can’t stand it anymore, he turns around to face him, gently touches his hair, lingers, an unspoken question; his heart leaps when Phillip leans into a kiss, and it sinks as he stiffly breaks away.

“We can’t keep doin’ this,” Phillip says. He sees Gordon open his mouth to object, and he continues, not letting him speak. “Do you think it’s so easy for me? Do you think I don’t remember the way things used to be? The way we used to be? We. Them. They were somethin’, weren’t they?” He grimaces, as if the words have left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. “But we’re not them, Gordon. They’re gone, and you know it.”

“But I want you,” Gordon blurts out, a slight tremble creeping into his voice. “Just you. I know things won’t be like they used to be. I’d sure give a lot for that, but I know better than to ask for it. I’m not asking for the past, I’m asking for now. Is it so difficult to understand? Or is it just impossible for you?”

“Maybe it is,” Phillip says flatly. Can’t Gordon see that they’re just playing pretend, one way or the other – pretending that they can have it all back and then pretending that they don’t care? He’s sick of it. He shakes his head. He wishes Gordon would forget him, fall in love with some poor girl Phillip knows he desperately tries to replace him with, to fill the empty space in his bed and his heart. He wishes he didn’t care, stopped finding cruel satisfaction in that game of teasing and chasing and turning away, stopped reminiscing, stopped flicking between wanting and resenting, and found a third option – the release of indifference. He’s still so tangled up in their work, their partnership; the past, barely recognizable, and the present, stifling, and he can barely imagine a future that wouldn’t just take him, in a circle, back to where he was. He needs to get away.

“I’ve been thinkin’…” he says after a pause. “I’d like to ask Milford if I can work here with him. You can give the Philly office to Desmond, he’ll do well.”

“You can’t stay here,” Gordon protests, not even trying to keep his voice down.

“I’m not askin’ for your permission,” Phillip retorts sharply. The idea is very fresh, actually, born only yesterday, when he was ruminating over a single page in Carl Rodd’s dossier, the bizarre incident in the woods, initially reading like a thousandth bullshit alien abduction story that he maybe might have dismissed, once, long ago, but now it intrigues him with some vague temptation. So, he’s got himself pretty set on it. If nothing else, if it wouldn’t bring a mystery or an answer to one, it would at least be a nice change of scenery, and an excuse to put some much-needed distance between him and Gordon. Talk of not understanding; can’t _he_ understand that they’re just torturing each other? He leaves the room without listening to Gordon’s arguments; he doesn’t have anything new to say anyway, just the same old maudlin love song, done to death, and Phillip has heard it all before.

 

Gordon refuses to follow him, however much he wants to; he has enough sense left to know it would only make things worse. Better let it cool down, talk to Phillip in the morning. Maybe take Milford to one side, make sure he doesn’t go along with Phillip’s idea, just to be safe. For now he tries to focus on work instead, keeps reading through the same files, drafting the agenda for the next day. But his mind drifts, coming back over and over again to Phillip’s threat of leaving. He wonders if he has anything to give him that would make him stay.

Lost in thought, he doesn’t even realize how much time has passed until a loud knock snaps him out of his reverie, and he glances at his watch; it’s almost midnight, already. There it is again, that invincible, pathetic hope; he struggles to appear casual as he opens the door. Phillip peels away from the door frame, pushes past him and staggers into the room, and falls heavily onto the bed, folding his arms under his head. By the look of him, he must’ve taken a lengthy detour via the hotel bar.

“Do you know how close it is?” he muses, squinting at the ceiling, his voice slowed-down and slurred.

“What do you mean?”

“Three hundred... and fifty four miles from here to Olympia.” He looks at Gordon, seeing him frown, and grins mischievously. “Wonder what would it feel like to stand in that room now. I bet they changed the carpet, but her blood is still in the floorboards. Wonder what ghosts we’d stir up if you fucked me right on that spot.”

“Have you been drinking?” The question comes out more like a statement. “You seem like it.” Gordon tries to keep the edge off his voice, tries not to show how shaken up he is. _Don’t let him provoke you_.

“Yeah. They call it a... sucker punch,” Phillip drawls, and then pauses for a moment, as if to gather his thoughts again.

“When I talked to Carl – Carl Rodd,” he mumbles, “I had him show me the place on the map. In the woods. The place in the woods. I had him show me how to get there.” It’s a lie, but he’s planned on doing it, possibly first thing tomorrow, which almost makes it the truth; and in the state he’s gotten himself into, the line between imagination and memory got significantly blurred.

“What place?” Gordon asks, although he already knows the answer.

“The place where he disappeared,” Phillip replies smugly. “Maybe if I go there, I’ll disappear too.” He sounds proud, brash, like a child bragging, _mom, dad, look what I can do_.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“You can’t stop me.” A gleam in his eye, arrogant, challenging. Something inside Gordon snaps, overrules sensible thinking. He goes through his things until he finds his handcuffs, and he walks over to Phillip, holds him down with one hand, fastens his wrists to the headboard with the other. A swift, practised movement. Phillip doesn’t resist.

“Oh, you got me now,” he intones mockingly. “All helpless. What are you gonna do?” He shifts, digs his heels into the mattress and pushes himself up into a slightly more comfortable position. Splaying out his legs, twisting his hips. Gordon closes his eyes and swallows hard. It’s all bubbling up and boiling over, his aching longing for Phillip, his fear of losing him, his anger at him and this goddamn game they’ve been playing; it goes to his head, he feels like he’s been drinking too, dizzy, hot, and God, so turned on. He fumbles with the buckle on Phillip’s belt, slips his hands down his pants, feels him getting hard, hears him purr and groan and it’s all the encouragement and concession he needs. He pulls Phillip’s shoes and pants off and stops for a moment, grabbing his thighs, tracing the blue-green veins showing through pale skin with his fingers, before he hastily undresses himself and gets onto the bed. He lifts and spreads Phillip’s legs, pushing them out of the way, and leans forwards, unbuttons Phil’s shirt all the way up, touches his throat, pressing down slightly, experimentally, for a moment, then touches his lips, and Phillip opens his mouth and sucks on Gordon’s fingers until he takes his hand away, warm and wet, and opens him up to thrust in deep. With screwed up eyes, Phillip bites his lip and stifles a moan, lifts his hips to meet Gordon’s, arching his back, twisting his arms, still chained above his head. His breath quickens, shallow and gasping, as Gordon picks up a frantic pace, racing them to the finish. Barely falters as a momentary doubt passes through his head, as he asks himself if this really is what Phillip wants or needs, but he’s too lost in the act to give it much thought, it’s too good to stop, and strangely, only like this, degraded to a thing, Phil finally looks and feels like a living being again, not so cold and distant anymore, with body heat and an indecipherable grimace of pleasure or pain, and that’s the best feeling of all, so Gordon goes on until he comes, inside of him. Phillip mumbles something indistinct, on the verge of passing out; Gordon stops, and bends over to gently touch his face, thinking how even in this dishevelled state, with his head lolling to one side, cheeks flushed red and a bubble of saliva in the corner of his mouth, Phillip still looks beautiful. Almost peaceful, absurdly, despite –

The fever in his body subsiding, Gordon slowly realises what he’s done, with a heavy heart and a sick feeling in his gut..

“I’m sorry, baby,” he mutters softly, unclipping the handcuffs, rubbing and kissing the raw red lines around Phillip’s wrists. Wants to kiss him too, looking at his lips, parted invitingly, but he’s violated enough boundaries already.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, pulling a blanket over Phillip’s naked body. Not wanting to disturb him any further, he finds the key to Phillip’s room in the pocket of his pants, discarded on the floor; gathers his things from the nightstand and his pyjamas from his suitcase and moves across the corridor for the night. He wouldn’t mind if the ground opened up to swallow him.

He braces himself for the worst when he knocks on his room’s door in the morning, but Phillip barely spares him a second glance as he mutters a good morning, takes his key from Gordon and walks past him. He’s carrying his yesterday’s clothes bundled up under his arm, and wearing nothing but a towel tied around his waist; his hair, still wet from the shower, drips water onto his bare shoulders. Gordon looks away, embarrassed.

 

“Phillip, I’m sorry,” he says when they meet again at breakfast. “I don’t know what came over me. You came in saying those things…” his voice breaks, pitiful, and he has to make himself look up from his coffee and meet Phillip’s eye.

“Are we meetin’ the mayor or the sheriff first?” Phillip’s voice is so cold it makes Gordon shudder. It sounds as if it came out of a machine, flat, vacant. His face is similarly expressionless, stony – not harsh, though, just blank. He surely must hate Gordon for taking advantage of him, he’s lost him now; he wanted to keep him so desperately and he’s ruined his chance. And then he remembers the discussion they’ve had, and Phillip’s drunken ramblings later that night, and wonders if he even had that chance in the first place.

 

iii.

He remembers the first case he’s worked on with Desmond. The way he felt the moment he walked into that house. Like playing blind man’s buff ‘round the Grand Canyon, you can’t even see where the edge is, but take a step too far in the wrong direction and you fall to your doom. “The walls are thin here,” he said. “Fragile.” Chet looked around, asking if Phillip reckoned that the structure was unsafe, and Phillip just smiled, shaking his head. No, he wasn’t talking about walls made of bricks and cement. He’s never believed himself having some sixth sense, and he didn’t even use to give much credence to such stories before Olympia. But then, and ever after, he’s felt himself become so intensely, horribly, overwhelmingly conscious of those things. Other worlds. A glimpse of a path beyond the veil, or whatever, and he tried so very hard to see through it, and maybe he’s succeeded just a little. It feels like he’s been tightrope walking ever since, and there’s a long way down to the ground, so most days he just looks ahead and doesn’t think about the empty space under his feet; it’s easier to keep your balance this way. Sometimes he looks down and falters. That’s what being here feels like, driving through these woods. Suddenly, terrifyingly aware that the ground might open up beneath him any moment. First praying he doesn’t fall. Eventually praying he finds the courage to simply jump, instead of fighting to hang on.

 

He never got – _used_ to Douglas Milford. The man is a dissonance, nothing about him fitting together. He deals in precisely the sort of preposterous impossibilities you’d expect to hear from some tinfoil-hatted kook, but with a disconcertingly convincing seriousness, and no mad gleam in his eye – only sometimes a glint of amusement. He is brash and bawdy and full of Boy’s Own army stories, the kind of old-fashioned manly charm that sits very well with Gordon, and much less with Phillip; but he also has the air of a man who _knows_ things, who’s had a peek behind the scenes, saw the secret workings of this world and isn’t fooled by the tricks anymore. He’s like that one annoying person at every circus magician’s show, who turns to you with a wink and leans and whispers to your ear how the illusion is achieved. It spoils the fun. It comforts you, tells you that there is no real magic. It assures you that the real magic is in the hands of people who can make you believe things. You can take it however you want.

Milford taps his finger on the sheets of printed paper. _Do you want to know how is it possible for the elephant to disappear?_ A stretch of letters and numbers, repeated over and over. _Smoke and mirrors, and a lot of panache._ But they don’t mean anything. _Of course, another answer, the most obvious, straightforward and complicated answer is: magic_. Jeffries looks up at him, frowning. _The only way to know for sure which answer is correct is to step onto the stage yourself, and hope there’s just a hidden trapdoor behind the curtain, nothing else_. He wants to understand. He needs to know more.

“Say, colonel,” he begins, sounding almost casually, “I wanted to ask you somethin’.” Gordon breathes in sharply, like he was about to say something, but after last night he had no courage to reprimand Phillip or impose anything on him, so he just stands there, getting all worked up in silence.

“What about?” Milford asks.

“The owls at Glastonbury Grove.”

Milford eyes him up carefully, with slow deliberation, and Jeffries bears up to his scrutiny with a look of obstinate determination on his face. Milford shakes his head, the corner of his mouth lifting in a half-smile.

“Damn, kid, you got some balls, I’ll give you that. But if you think I’ll let you mess about around this place, you can think again.”

Jeffries swallows hard, like he’s trying to push back an angry response that’s already almost on his lips. If there’s one thing he can’t stand above all else, it’s being talked down to, like he was a child, like he couldn’t handle –

“I’ve seen my share of fucked-up things too, you know,” he says, and Milford lets out a short, derisive laugh. Phillip already knows he’s lost, and Gordon, to whom this defeat is a win, exhales with relief. Phil wants to argue, hell, he _really_ wants to argue, but he knows it’s pointless, so he backs down, sulking. In his mind, he’s already sketching new plans: get back to Carl Rodd, for sure. Maybe get something out of some other folks in town too…

“Chin up, kid,” Milford says, a glint of amusement in his eye, but his voice more serious than a moment ago. “This ain’t the only place in the world, you know”. Jeffries looks up at him, frowning, and then nods slowly in understanding. That’s right. This ain’t the only place. What he’s looking for, he can find somewhere else; maybe anywhere.

Green is the colour of poison, seeping into his veins. It’s a drug, it’s a rush, it will lift him up so high before he falls all the way down below. It’s a blinking light of a gun-sight, and he’s caught in the crosshairs, it’s a neon-lit, electric death; and it’s another death, without a bang, lost deep in the woods with no straight way out, only endless circles. It’s the difference between a secret and a mystery – one of those remains unknown, by a fundamental law of the universe; one of those demands a price.


	8. scattering

i.

It’s almost too easy; Gordon keeps everything locked in his office, but Phil knows where he keeps the keys. To take the files out and copy them would be too risky, but he doesn’t need to do that – he just reads them, maybe takes a few notes, he’ll still remember the important bits. He’s pretty sure Gordon is hiding things from him, that all the important cases are being assigned to the others behind his back, that Cooper’s reports land directly on Gordon’s desk. Does he need to be in charge so badly, or is it just Phil specifically that he doesn’t trust anymore?

He thinks he’s onto something. He listens to Cooper’s tapes and he’s pretty sure that _he_ can’t see it. Now Jeffries finally feels like he’s the one to be ahead of the game. He’ll make sure it stays this way.

 

Diane glances up at him as he enters, but he mouths a “don’t stop”; she can’t hear it over the clicking of the typewriter and Dale’s voice on the tape, but she can read it from his lips, so she keeps writing for a while, and then, with a sigh, switches the recorder off and takes off her headphones.

“Hello, Phil. What is it?”

“I said, ‘don’t stop’,” he repeats.

“I’ve got this whole tape to transcribe. Dream journal, October 25th to November 11th, 1985,” she recites, and Phillip nods. “That’s gonna take a while, you know. Are you planning to just stand over me the entire time?” He sits down on the edge of her desk, half-facing her.

“That’s not any better,” she grumbles. “Just tell me what you want, and then I’ll get back to it, okay?”

“I want the tape, after you’ve finished.”

“What, that’s it? I was going to pass it to Gordon straight away when I’m done.” He usually seems calm to the point of not caring, but now Diane notices something odd flash in his eyes, an anger she’s never seen there.

“I am the task force leader, damn it,” he says through gritted teeth, like he’s barely keeping from raising his voice. And then he takes a deep breath, inhale-exhale, running a hand through his hair, and looks at her again, the expression on his face softening a little.

“I’m sorry, Diane. Just… give these to me and no-one else, alright?”

“Sure,” she says, quirking an eyebrow, and putting the headphones back on. “I was going to ask if you want to go for a drink after work, but if you’re gonna be in such a lousy fucking mood, I’ll pass,” she adds quietly, without looking up, putting a new sheet of paper in the typewriter.

 

“So, you two in a little tiff?” The way she says ‘you two’ is suggestive enough, and Jeffries takes the hint; she sees him glare at her over the rim of his glass, and cuts him off before he has a chance to say anything.

“Easy, Phil. I guessed the two of you got something going ages ago, and I don’t give a damn. Your business. Personally, I wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole, but you are clearly insane,” she says with a shrug.

“Maybe I am,” he agrees, with a faraway look in his eyes. Diane squints up at him, examining his about-to-go-off-on-an-existential-tangent expression, and sighs.

“Oh, fuck. You know what, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t wanna hear about your problems after all.”

“You might have me out of your hair pretty soon,” he retorts.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m lookin’ for a change of scenery,” he says, enigmatically, and takes another sip of his drink, or more of a gulp, a big, burning gulp, and closes his eyes. “Just don’t mention that to Gordon, either.”

“Well, if you want to transfer, you have to tell him,” she says carefully. “You can’t just disappear one day, you know.”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t be fair, would it?” he muses.

“No, I meant, you literally cannot do that. You gotta do all the stuff you hate first, talk to your supervisor, to someone in HR, do the paperwork, or, as always, charm someone into doing it for you…” she thinks she can see a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and snuffs it out immediately. “Dream on, darling. Get your own secretary.” She looks at Phil staring off into space, and decides she’s had enough, determined for this evening to be… well, something else than horrible.

“Okay,” she says, “not one more word about work, or I’ll go stir crazy. It’s past office hours. We’re supposed to be having fun, for fuck’s sake. If you still remember what that is.”

 

She likes dancing with Phil. There’s not a shred of anything romantic in it, he’s just really damn good at it, so she enjoys it, in a different way than she enjoys dancing with Cooper, who’s a bit clumsy, but in a disarmingly cute way that sends her heart fluttering more than she’d like to admit. Tonight, though, Phillip gives off an aura of a grim resolve, like it’s his last night on Earth and he’s desperate to lose himself in it but finds himself unable to, and it dampens and smothers her mood like a dripping wet blanket, and no amount of cocktails can help. Funny that, though: usually, or in a different company, Diane would have been the one to be reprimanded for having a few too much, but this time Phil has her beat in the heats. For once she gets to say, gently but unwaveringly, “I think you’ve had enough”, and finds an oddly amusing, tipsy satisfaction in dragging her boss, staggering on the verge of collapse, out onto the street and into a cab. Still, she can’t help but worry about him, just a little, for a while, before she decides it’s probably none of her business. They’re not that close, after all.

She only cared for one moment, when they were waiting on the curb and he threw his head back, looking up at the night sky, and suddenly his legs buckled under him, and with an arm around his skinny frame she could feel him shaking, and then his eyes actually rolled all the way up like he was some possessed child in a goddamn horror movie, and she half-expected him to start speaking tongues and yell in pain when that crucifix hanging from his neck starts burning his skin, but the spasm passed as abruptly as it had started, and from that strange, dark moment he slipped into a very human kind of slobbering near-unconsciousness, and she thought, _fuck,_ he’s not alright at all and won’t be in the morning, and it won’t be just the hangover. But it’s none of her business, and he wouldn’t tell her anything even if he was fit to talk, anyway.

 

He lies in bed, feeling the world spin around and under him, and he isn’t sure how much of it is drunken dizziness and how much is some newly gained cosmic perspective, ‘cause he can see stars under his eyelids like he’s falling through space, and they blur into washed-out nebulae, flashing iridescent colours of afterimages of light as tears fill his eyes. He can’t tell why he’s crying; it’s like there’s pain he doesn’t really feel, he only knows it’s there, but the sensation doesn’t belong to him. Maybe it really doesn’t, maybe it reaches him from somewhere else, a lone, lost signal in the dark. A thread tied around him, pulling, and he gives in. He feels as if he was standing on the edge of something, on a doorstep, waiting to come inside, or maybe about to walk out. And there’s someone calling, always from far away, no matter for how long he follows, he goes on and on never reaching the end, and he would give anything, he would give his life for a single moment of revelation, a meaning, a purpose understood and fulfilled, but he’s still stumbling around blind.

He feels heavy, weighted down, sinking, and he falls into restless sleep like into murky water, tossing and turning with sweat-soaked sheets wrapped around him, like he was drowning, tangled up in weeds. He wakes up when the morning sun shines in his eyes through the blinds he’s left open, with a dull ache at the back of his head and a foul taste in his mouth. He takes off the crumpled yesterday’s clothes and goes to take a shower, standing under the icy water until he’s shivering from the cold, and then to the kitchen for a breakfast of painkillers and coffee. He thinks about what to do, and he only realizes how much time he has passed staring blankly ahead when the phone rings, a sharp noise slicing through his brain and snapping him out of his reverie, and he looks up at the clock. Late to work, so it’s probably Gordon calling to ask where he is, ‘cause there’s another pointless assignment waiting for him. Well, guess what, maybe he’s not showing up at the office at all today, how’s that? He gets up with a groan under his breath, only to yank the cord out of the wall socket. Satisfied, he goes back to finish his coffee, and lights up his third cigarette this morning.

 

ii.

“Look at me, Jeffries!”

He almost regrets saying it, because Phil does turn away from the window and stares at him, and everything in that stare makes Gordon’s blood boil with another too-strong emotion. Phil’s face, for one, in general. It’s like a page from memory, Gordon can’t look at it without seeing it in flashbacks, all the stops of the journey from their room at the academy to his office, here and now. Beautiful as ever. There’s also this self-important smirk on it that would make a more violent man wipe it away with his knuckles by now. It’s like Phil was so high above Gordon, above everything he’s talking about, above the whole goddamn world; like he was daring them to bring him down. Then there are his eyes (real pretty too), fixed on Gordon, and the longer he looks into them, the more sure he is there’s something behind them, like they’re frozen water and there’s a dark shape swimming deep beneath the ice, and he doesn’t like it one bit. Feels like the ice is thinner than it seems, and that something down there is waiting to swallow anyone who falls under.

“Everything you do goes through me, do you understand?!”

Phil snorts and shakes his head slowly. “Want me to suck your dick under that desk too, boss?” he drawls, sweet voice that smells of poison for a mile off. Gordon’s temper is right about to short-circuit and blow. As if it wasn’t enough that Jeffries has been again disappearing on his own private escapades doing God-knows what, and with him pages from case files, that Gordon has to stick up for him and make excuses before his superiors to keep the task force afloat, that he hasn’t been returning calls or speaking to Gordon beyond the strict workplace necessity, he now has the nerve to sit sprawled in that chair like he owns the place and talk to Gordon like that –

“You’re on thin ice, Jeffries,” he says, turning around the metaphor of his earlier train of thought. “I hope you realize that.”

Phil stands up abruptly, pushing back the chair with a horrible, grating noise that makes Gordon wince, and leans over him.

“You don’t know a damn thing,” he says. “You sit here between these four walls all day, I think you forgot what the world out there is like. You forgot it’s bigger than this room.” He shakes his head again. “Oh, you just – you have no idea. Ten years, we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. But that’s gonna change.”

Gordon might say that he can hardly know anything if Phil’s been hiding stuff away from him, but he’s not in the mindset for a witty comeback; instead, he just does his best to try and match Phil’s steely glare, keep his cool and wrap his head around what Phil is saying – in that order.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asks, having somehow soldiered through the first two items on the list.

“I’m talkin’ about things that are bigger than you, or anyone else in this building.” He points up at the ceiling, and then at Gordon. “And I’ll tell you one more thing. What I’m doin’, what I’m workin’ on, you’re tryin’ to stop me? You should be thankin’ me. I’m only doin’ what I’m meant to do. The job you yourself put me on, all those years back. And I’m gonna see it through to the end.”

He hears a shouted ‘wait!’ from behind his back as he walks out of Gordon’s office, closing the door, and away, down the corridor, towards the elevator.

 

They’re sitting on the couch in Phil’s living room, with Phil snuggled up to Gordon, smoking; he’s dropping ash on Gordon’s tie but Gordon doesn’t mind. God, if tonight ends like it seems it will – or rather if it goes where Gordon’s imagination has already took it, the moment he laid his eyes on Phil, the moment he felt Phil’s body cling to his – it’s gonna be worthy of fitting the floor at their feet with a commemorative stone plaque. On this day, here they fucked, despite avoiding each other for days turning to weeks, so many that Gordon has lost count. He sighs. He’s too soft for Phillip, that’s the problem. He can shout and bark orders and bang his fist on the desk, but at the end of the day he lets Phil have his way, again and again; he can tell himself that all the love he feels is just the residue of memories, and that there will never be nothing more between them so he better gives up trying, and yet he comes running back here in a heartbeat when Phil wants to see him. He wishes there was no other intention behind it than to simply be with him, but he knows that can’t be true.

“What is it, sweetheart?” The affectionate words have a strange flavour to them, he finds it hard to wrap his mouth around them, unused, unspoken for too long. But at the same time they seem natural, or at least warranted by the situation.

“What’s what?” Phillip mumbles through the cigarette between his teeth.

“What is it that you wanted to talk to me about.”

“Oh, right.” He looks up with a sideways smile. “You think I want somethin’ from you? Maybe I just missed you.”

Gordon isn’t angry – but he feels like he maybe should be, at Phillip teasing him like that. Only he can’t find it in himself, deflated, no air to feed a fire, the spark that could ignite it and explode falls into a vacuum. He tries to read the expression on Phillip’s face, and maybe it’s just some wishful thinking on his part, but he thinks he can see some honesty in it. There’s a longing there, although he can’t tell if he’s the object of it, if it has anything to do with him at all. But it makes him even weaker, and he gives Phillip the benefit of the doubt.

“Well, I’m here,” he says. “You know I’m always here for you.”

“Yeah.”

He pulls himself up, puts a hand on the back of Gordon’s head and kisses him, long and deep, and he feels Gordon’s hand slip under his robe.

“Yeah,” he says again, and then again, turning it into a murmur, and a stifled groan.

 

It doesn’t matter that after every night they spent together there have been long days when they barely acknowledged each other’s presence. It doesn’t matter that Gordon has been seeing an occasional girlfriend and that Phillip has been – well, doing whatever the hell it was that kept him busy when he wasn’t coming home at night or returning calls. If Gordon ever thought that he was finally ready for them to go their separate ways, it was a lie, and it becomes painfully obvious now. He can hardly bear the thought of them being apart _for real_ ; however distant they might seem to each other, at times, there’s always a hope for closeness as long as they are physically close, even if working together is the only reason for them to meet. But if Phillip goes away, if he wants to go, if he truly feels that there’s nothing keeping him here – how there can be any hope that if he comes back at all, he will come back to Gordon?

“How long?” he asks. Phillip shrugs.

“A year, maybe. Maybe more.” He sees the heartbroken look on Gordon’s face.

“Maybe it’ll do us good to be apart,” he says coolly. “Maybe we’ll finally let go.”

“I don’t want to let go.”

“I know,” Phillip says simply, his voice softening a little. He’s not trying to be cruel; he wishes Gordon would see that. He knows what comes next; they’ve had that argument already, when he first hinted at leaving. Repeated motions, again and again, defined and practised like steps of a dance. Why are you doing this to me? To yourself? Why don’t you give us a chance? As if it was all about Gordon, or their relationship. He still doesn’t understand anything, does he?

“What do you even hope to achieve?” he asks, and Phillip shakes his head. How can he begin to explain? Locked behind layers of unsaid things, hiding within Chinese boxes of secrets within secrets. He wasn’t sure which would make for a better reason, that old need to run away or a hint of what he’ll be after when he gets there, and felt like both might be too much, so he eventually went with the former. More familiar, less scary, maybe. But Gordon still has this nagging, gnawing feeling that something bad might happen, or will happen; it is, in fact, more of a certainty. Kind of like back in nineteen-seventy five, only much, much worse. Phillip dismisses it, saying that this comes with the job, that there's always risks. The worst thing is, Gordon isn’t sure if Phillip simply doesn’t believe him, perhaps thinking he’s inventing reasons to make him stay, or if he knows Gordon to be right, deep down shares his fears, but is too stubborn to admit he might be making a wrong decision.

“What if you don’t come back?”

“Then I’ll go on instead,” Phillip says, and Gordon can’t really tell if he’s joking.

“Jeffries, I’m serious.” He sighs. “I don’t like it. I... don’t want you to go.”

“Huh,” Phillip scoffs. “And did you ever ask yourself what I want? Do you even care about that?”

“Well, what do you want?” Gordon asks, as if he hasn’t asked that already, over and over, in the same or other words, with gestures of affection, with coming back to knock on Phillip’s door, with letting Phil string him along, hoping they can be together again, with patience and with persistence, for the better part of the last ten years. _Of course I care, so_ _tell me, just tell me, and I’ll give it to you_. As always, Phillip doesn’t answer.

 

iii.

He counts the dial tones ring out ten times, and Gordon still doesn’t pick up. He imagines him at home alone, brooding over a bottle of wine, or jacking off to Phil’s old photos. Maybe he has some girl over instead. Maybe it’s better this way.

He wanders around the apartment, pacing from wall to wall, from room to room, aimlessly. Picks up something at random from the bookshelf, but he can’t focus on reading. He lights up another cigarette, walks over to the window and pulls the curtains apart, and sees his reflection, transparent, like a ghost, superimposed over the cityscape. He stares at it for a while, and then opens the window and leans on the sill, feeling the crisp night air on his face. He can’t say he’s surprised when he sees a car pull up, and then Gordon getting out and looking up; he takes a step back in, out of his line of sight. Doesn’t answer the doorbell, doesn’t even turn around; his body feels heavy, feet rooted to the floor. He wishes he’d turned the lights off, pretended he’s not in. Locked the door. He hears Gordon let himself in.

“I just tried to call you,” he says by way of a greeting, still not facing him. “What I said earlier... wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.” It’s as good an apology as Gordon will get, and he accepts it. It’s rare for Phillip to admit to a fault, especially in front of him – and maybe it’s only in Gordon’s mind, but it sounds to him like asking for some kind of closure; straightening things out before saying goodbye. So yes, he will forgive Phillip for everything, and he will do anything that Phillip will ask of him, if it means there’s a faintest chance –

“Please, don’t try to change my mind,” Phillip says, as if reading his thoughts. It couldn’t have been too hard, even without looking at him; he’s voiced them a thousand times by now. A thousand conversations, all ending up the same. Phillip can’t go through all of this again, not now.

“I’ll get you somethin’,” he says, and goes to the kitchen; head down, avoiding eye contact.

“Phillip,” Gordon says softly, coming up behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. Phil grabs the edge of the dining table, his knuckles going white.

“Let’s... not talk. Please.” He sighs, and closes his eyes. “I want you to take me, right here,” he says. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

Gordon feels a painful stab of anger mixed with sadness; that last remark cuts deep. Yes, of course, as he was driving here he imagined they would make love, he hoped for it; but that wasn’t the only reason he came. Does Phillip really think so little of him?

“Sweetheart,” he murmurs into Phillip’s shoulder as he wraps his arms around him, pulling him close. He is still ready to forgive, and to do whatever’s needed… He loosens this tight embrace, turning it into a caress, his hands roving over Phillip’s body, feeling it through the fabric of his shirt, tracing the contours of his ribs, the dip at his waist. He kisses the back of Phillip’s neck as his fingers work to unbuckle his belt, unzip and pull down his pants, and then his underwear; he stops only to take off his own as well, and then his hands are back on Phillip, bending him over a little deeper, holding him. God, he’s going to miss this. Slow thrusts, unhurried. He’s going to miss the way Phillip’s body feels, the smell of his hair. The sound of his voice. Rocking gently, a bit unsteady as a tremor passes through him. He’s going to miss Phillip so much. A whole year, maybe longer. Maybe he’ll never come back, so many things can go wrong. He tries to push those images from his mind, lose himself in the moment, but they keep coming back, like a tide. Killed, some thug putting a bullet through his head. Dead, buried in a ditch, never to be found. Lost in some other way, impossible to imagine. Or alive, but simply deciding to never come back, like he’s been hinting at for so long. He feels the prickle of tears in his eyes, he feels weak in the knees, and grabs the edge of the table for support.

“I can’t,” he gasps, his voice breaking. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry –”

Phillip turns around, pushing himself up, and silences Gordon’s apologies with a kiss. It feels so good. Maybe it’s just Gordon’s imagination, but he can feel so much love in it, the taste of old times, long gone. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair for it to feel so good when he’s about to lose it –

“Shh. It’s alright, darlin’. It’s alright.” Phillip kicks off his pants, still tangled around his ankles, and puts Gordon’s arm around his shoulders, letting him lean in on him, his fingers brushing gently through Gordon’s hair. “Why don’t we lie down, huh?” He leads Gordon to the bedroom, and turns to him, putting a hand under Gordon’s chin.

“We can switch, you know,” he says with a smile. “If you’d like that.”

 

He looks so fragile, there and then, curled up on the bed, silent, facing away. Absentmindedly, Gordon reaches out to touch the scar on his lower back, and for a second Phillip tenses; Gordon can’t see his face, but he imagines him wince in a pang of phantom pain. He runs his finger across it, and further up, tracing the craggy line of his spine, prominent under the skin, making Phillip shiver. He didn’t mean to be unpleasant, but he becomes suddenly obsessed with provoking those reactions, like a kid prodding an insect with a stick to see how it squirms, he wants to do something, anything to break this disquieting, this _infuriating_ stillness that Phillip has fallen into. It’s not just that he’d like Phillip to make love to him again, although he certainly wouldn’t mind. It’s the fear of never seeing him again, and never getting to _really_ know him, the him that he has become (or maybe has been all along, deep down), distant, alien; and as if he was some elaborate puzzle box, Gordon wants to turn him around in his hands, re-examine every inch of him, strip off the surface and poke around the innards, see how he ticks, because he wants so badly to get to whatever is hidden inside but he can’t crack it any other way. Maybe it’s all in Gordon’s head, maybe it’s always been – the romance, the mystery, the magic, anything he could come up with, anything he needed to explain why he was so drawn to Jeffries and couldn’t let go. But still, insistent, desperate, he wants to rip old wounds open, tear at them until they hurt again and kiss them until they heal –

_He’s thinking about something, Phillip knows it, he can almost hear the cogs whirring. Touching him, and to Phil it feels no more personal, no more attentive, no more meaningful than as if Gordon was doodling on a notepad while being on the phone, even though he’s no doubt thinking about Phillip, himself and Phillip. Thinking of them as if they were already apart, as if he was only a memory, but he’s here. He’s here, and tomorrow he won’t be. If Gordon acts like it’s already tomorrow, tonight will be nothing, empty, blurred and blending into the night after, and all the nights that will come after that._

Phillip shrugs him off and turns over to face him, grabs his wrist and stares at him with such an aching look in his eyes that for a second Gordon feels as if someone punched him in the gut, knocked his breath out of him.

“Tell me,” he begs, when he feels like he can speak again. “Tell me what to do.”

“Ain’t nothing for you to do. I just need to –” he trails off.

“What, sweetheart?” Gordon asks, putting a hand on Phillip’s cheek, stroking it gently with his thumb. “What do you need?”

“I don’t know,” Phillip sighs. “I just… I just feel like I’m still stuck on the bad side of the mirror.”

Gordon frowns. “What do you mean?”

Phillip smiles; it’s a grimace without joy, a small twitch of muscle. “Somethin’ I used to do, when I was a kid. Whenever things got tough for me, I’d – I’d go to the bathroom, or to my parents’ bedroom, and I’d look my reflection in the eye, in the mirror. I told myself that if I could hold his stare until he blinks, I’d win, and he would have to switch places with me; I could escape to the other side and he’d have to go on livin’ my life. I stopped believin’ in it a long time ago, sure, but I… never really stopped doin’ it. Never stopped tryin’.”

“Do you think it would’ve been better over there?” Gordon asks, struggling with the words catching in his throat. “That it would’ve been worth leaving everything behind?”

“I’ll only know when I get there,” Phillip says. Gordon is silent, for a moment, staring at Phillip’s face next to his on the pillow. The look in his eyes, a crack in the cold hard shell, and what’s peeking through is soft and trembling and hurting.

“You don’t think you’re coming back, do you?” It barely sounds like a question.

“I don’t plan on dyin’, if that’s what you mean,” Phillip replies, sharply, emphatically, and Gordon can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to convince himself as well. “But I… I can’t tell what will happen. Best you don’t waste your time waitin’ for me.” He turns over again, but this time he clings to Gordon, his back against Gordon’s chest, their fingers interlaced over his heart, and Gordon holds him tight.

 

He sits up on the bed, lighting up a cigarette. Should be getting up soon. Gordon must’ve dozed off eventually, but he stirs and wakes up almost immediately after Phillip slips out of his grasp. With a sleepy groan he pushes himself up and wraps his arms around Phillip’s waist, kissing his neck and shoulders, breathing in the smell of his hair, his skin.

“I gotta go.” A grumble of protest. “I’m serious, Gordon. Let me at least go call a cab –”

“I’ll drive you,” Gordon says. Phillip considers it for a while. Honestly, the longer the goodbyes take, the worse it’s gonna get, but Gordon’s apparently dead set on it, and for the love of God, Phillip is not gonna be arguing now. Can’t find the energy for it, can’t find no anger, no bitterness; doesn’t want to end it like that, either.

“Alright.”

 

“Christ, you look like it’s my goddamn funeral,” he says, and manages a smile. “I ain’t dead yet. I’ll see you again.”

Gordon can’t really say he ever took Phil for granted; his love has never quite lost the spark, even as it changed, from that moony crush back at the academy to the passionate reunion afterwards, to something that felt as close as they could ever get to home, to a desperate fight to keep it from crumbling down. But even as it was changing, as they were changing, he took it for a constant, whatever shape it might take next. To be cut away from each other, for God knows how long, was unimaginable, and he’s known for a while that it was going to happen but he still hasn’t figured out how to deal with that.

And that last night, he knew that Phillip was looking for a reason to change his mind, but Gordon didn’t know what to say beyond what he’s already been saying, and so the chance has passed, and if Phillip’s resolve has wavered after that, he wasn’t showing it.

If it weren’t for last night, for what Phillip had said, Gordon could maybe believe what he’s heard just now, that they will see each other again, that this goddamn assignment will be over eventually and everything will go back to normal. He can still pretend, like it’s all just about that investigation and nothing else.

And maybe, he thinks, it ultimately doesn’t matter, how personal this feels to either of them. After all, there’s their work to consider, too. Something bigger, more important than they are. A prize to outweigh any cost, and if Jeffries is right then it could be within reach, for the first time. Gordon realizes that he’s become comfortable with the perpetual searching, walking down a road that seemed to stretch so endless that you never had to worry about where it leads to just yet. If Phillip could see something on that horizon, wasn’t it ultimately the right thing to do, to follow it? Wasn’t that the whole point? He’s suddenly overcome with the feeling, the knowledge, the absolute certainty that every step along the way has led to this point, and it only marginally makes things easier.

“Take care, Jeffries.” terse, with a business-like shake of the hand, and a friendly pat and squeeze of the shoulder, maybe a tad too tight for the emotionless facade. For pretending like they were never nothing more than colleagues, like last night never happened, and neither did the kiss in the car. No “I love you”, with choking back tears. A mask, wearing thin. Phillip picks up his suitcase and walks over to the gate, without looking back.


	9. trembling motion

i.

He sits at the bar of some strange night club, with some time to spare before the prearranged meeting. The morning already feels so distant, hours and miles away, as if it belonged to another life, not one of his own, or at least not the one he’s living right now. Well, that’s the case as far as his cover story is concerned. He finds it harder than expected, to ease into it, to become someone else. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t done it for so long; but at the end of the day he just blames Gordon. He was supposed to be a reason to stay or a reason to go, but the verdict remained undecided, so he kept lingering on Phillip’s mind, reminding himself. Hard to cut all ties when someone’s hanging on to you so tight.

There’s a small stage in the corner; a band’s playing in the back, obscured in the shadows, and a single spotlight falls on a woman singing, glinting off her long sequinned dress, a myriad tiny lights shimmering as she sways slowly to the rhythm of the music. Phillip can’t discern the words, his Spanish certainly isn’t good enough to understand it, but he reckons it must be a love song, one of the sad ones; the woman’s voice is thick and syrupy and maudlin. He claps with the rest of the patrons when she finishes, blows a kiss to the audience and vanishes between the heavy velvet drapes at the back. The orchestra goes silent too, and the lights change to a dim purple, flooding the entire room with a filtered, hazy glow; it feels like swimming underwater. Someone brings out a large mirror, and sets it up on the stage, knocking on it, walking around it, while a voice comes from somewhere behind the curtains.

“What you are about to witness, ladies and gentlemen,” it says, in heavily accented English, “is magic. Of course, if you would prefer – for your own peace of mind, think of it as merely an illusion.” Jeffries rolls his eyes and that’s when he must’ve missed something, because as far as he can tell, a man has just stepped out of the glass.

He knows it’s a trick – _they do it with mirrors,_ he thinks, and can’t help but smile and scoff and shake his head – but he keeps on watching the show, intrigued despite himself, and with an odd feeling of unease. God, that’s too small a word for it; he is so fucking on edge, like he was some greenhorn rookie. Could do with another drink; should try to keep a clear head, sure, but right now what he needs more is to drown some of the thoughts banging around it, let them sink to the bottom. He swirls the liquid in the glass around and downs it in one gulp, and then feels someone put a hand on his shoulder, and flinches as if something wet and particularly disgusting has landed there; and to be fair, the man’s pale, sweaty hand bears some resemblance to a dead fish. He half-turns around to see his contact, Roger, and relaxes a little, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair.

“Welcome to Argentina, mister –”

“Randall,” Phil mutters, rocking gently on the chair’s hind legs, balancing precariously as he leans to shake Roger’s hand. A name picked at random, just now, but it rolls off his tongue naturally enough. Roger nods approvingly.

The briefing is short, cut down to essentials. There’s not much to talk about. He knows what to do, it’s his case, after all; and as for Roger, his only role is to introduce Jeffries to certain people and then quietly watch his back, and he doesn’t need to know all the details. Not the important ones, the ones that have made Jeffries haul his ass all the way down here. The pages in his notes marked with two words: _blue rose_. Not even Gordon has seen those, although he must’ve suspected they had existed. Why else would Jeffries be so insistent on coming here, with a stubbornness that seemed almost religious in its devotion, like he was on the quest for the Holy fucking Grail itself, if it weren’t indeed just like that? The only goal worth leaving everything behind.

 

Electricity is yellow, a sickly hue. It smells like scorched engine oil and tastes like rot. He can tell something’s hanging in the air, something besides the nauseating smell like burning trash and rotten meat, stirred up by the sluggish whirring of the ceiling fan; a message he cannot decode, written in static prickling against his skin. He knows those sensations are his alone, shared by no one else in the room, but that doesn’t make them any less real, or any less overwhelming.

He watches one of the men in the room, and the girl sitting on his lap, with her arms wrapped around his neck. She looks like she’s about fifteen, sixteen maybe; can’t be much older, even if she looks younger than her age. The man’s hand runs through her long dark hair, down her back, exposed in a skimpy summer dress, and further down. Phil grits his teeth and doesn’t say anything. He looks away instead, and catches eye contact with another girl, standing in the corner, swaying her hips slowly to the music on the radio, and she winks at him and cocks her head, in an unspoken offer: _do you want me? I’ll cheer you up._ She peels away from the wall and smiles, like a glimpse of a memory, pink lips licked wet, a shimmer of a gold necklace hanging between jutting collarbones, heavy, half-closed eyes in a delicate face of a child. He looks her up and down and thinks, did he also look so pitiful, all those years back? He wants to stroke her head and give her some cash and tell her to go home get herself a real job, and he remembers Lefèvre, and suddenly it all appears as an unbroken circle, all of this, this whole goddamn universe, endlessly, pointlessly repeating, same old crap over and over. At least he ain’t gonna fuck her, he tells himself that like there won’t be someone else instead, like all this shit could end with him ‘cause he managed to be a decent human being: cue applause. Still worth it, he reckons, breaking the cycle, a small victory against the encroaching dark, one thing done better than the last time around. Like it matters. He half-heartedly joins the conversation at the table.

 

He picks a place to go back to, some random hotel he’s passed by one day, and heads for the bar, choosing a table with a discreet but good view onto the street; he orders himself a drink and sips it slowly, and leaves only when he’s sure he hasn’t been watched or followed. The detour is a safety measure, of course, but he needs a walk too, and it’s not too close or too far from where he’s actually staying at. He’s always liked to do that, to go out for no other reason than to be on the move; always made him feel better, helped him clear his head. Tonight, the night is warm and pleasant and he’s still brooding. Go figure.

It’s always helped him clear his head but tonight, in this place, it seems to do the opposite. Suddenly he feels like he’s in that one old story about a man being hanged, who in the last moment before his neck snaps he falls into a dream, the kind of dream where you live out a lifetime in a few minutes of slumber, and it’s more vivid than life, he can hear the rustle of the creek as loud as the crashing of the waves on a stormy sea, he can see every particle of dust glitter in the sunlight as if it was the brightest star itself; it’s just like that, all senses heightened, a tremor under his feet where the crisp night air meets the hot ground, a cacophony of distant voices from bars and clubs, and insects chirping around the candles on terraces, and blinding bright city lights, and somewhere, in another layer of reality, there is a noose tightening around his neck.

 

ii.

“I’m a businessman, not one of your _sicarios_.”

Pointedly, he flicks off a non-existent speck off the immaculate white lapels of his suit. He doesn’t spare a second glance towards the young man sitting in the centre of the room, tied to a chair; already saw all there was to be seen anyway. The beads of sweat running down the man’s face, and further down his neck, soaking into his shirt. The pleading in his eyes.

“I don’t do business with men afraid to get their own hands dirty.”

 _Or ones who don’t do everything you say_ , Jeffries thinks. It’s a loyalty test, plain and simple, as if he was a teenage kid being initiated into a street gang; it has the banality of a worn-off cliché that makes it clear beyond any doubt. And at the end of the day it’s him, and potentially the success of the whole operation, or some poor bastard who’s gonna get it anyway, no matter by whose hand, and at least he’ll make it clean and quick. He pulls out his gun and fires in one swift motion, it’s over in a matter of seconds. It will return to haunt him later, when he’s alone in his hotel room, emptying the contents of the minibar, trying to black out ‘cause he can’t fall asleep, but it’s worth it, it’s all gonna be worth it: he’s convinced of that. For now, as he turns around to leave, his face is a mask, still and impenetrable.

 

This is a man’s world. If there’s any women, they only skirt its edges, but even though near invisible, they must be there – someone’s gotta wash their dirty shirts and feed their fat mouths and suck their little dicks, so there must be women somewhere around, wives, girlfriends, housemaids, prostitutes. But there’s no women in the business itself, no women talking deals or riding with the convoys or even cooking the stuff that the men sell. And yet they mention a woman’s name, even if it’s only a pseudonym, they speak of _her_ , in hushed mutterings, with respect, with fear. And so it stands out.

And then there’s something like a link, a point of convergence, a clue, a confirmation, at long last. A body of a man, streaks of dried blood running down his chest, a spatter of blood on the wall behind him like the tail of a comet. There isn’t much of the head left; the whole upper half is missing as if ripped off, but Jeffries can still see the man’s mouth, a tongue like a slug slithering out between swollen lips, slightly parted. His stomach jolts, and he swallows hard. It looks unreal, like a horror movie prop, but the tell-tale smell of early decay indicates beyond doubt that the corpse ain’t rubber and paint. And he’s seen it before, another one just like it. An undeciphered connection. A skull cracked like an egg and a woman’s name, whispered in terror. Not much to go on, but maybe it’s enough.

 

He isn’t sure for how much longer this can go on. There is a sense of impending doom, heavy in the air. He feels transparent and exposed, he feels like someone or something has him in its sights, but he turns around and can’t see nothing there. Still, if there’s one thing he knows, with perfect clarity, with unwavering conviction of nothing but a belief, it’s that this path folds in on itself, and what is so far out of reach is breathing down his neck. It’s not even about who’s the hunter, and who’s the hunted; such a question is meaningless, there has never been a distinction. It was always about the movement itself, the action of a chase, without real purpose or real choice. A spiral, like a spring, ever-circling, ever-repeating, but never going back to the start, always reaching upwards, further and further until cut off, going around one last time to meet itself, but never become itself.

“Fuck,” he curses quietly under his breath as the razor slips out of his fingers and clatters into the sink. He looks at it, sighing, and then back up at himself in the mirror, and breathes in sharply, suddenly startled.

There’s nothing wrong with his face. It looks the same as yesterday. The same as a week ago, maybe only a bit worse for wear, with the accumulated tiredness that a few hours of restless sleep per night don’t fix. Pretty much the same as a month ago, maybe a shade or two darker, its usual pallor finally losing to the early summer sun. Almost the same as a year ago, maybe older, the lines in the corners of his eyes and mouth a little deeper. But those kinds of changes are slow, gradual, letting you grow accustomed to them, seeming already familiar as they happen so you pay them no heed. No, there had to be something more, a specific set of circumstances, a certain angle, a particular quality of light, that has triggered this sudden shock. Even more than this, something less usual, like a thin streak of blood running down his chin, that brings an old image to his mind, forgotten for thirty-odd years. An old dream – no, more than a dream; he was sure of it then, and he relives that absolute certainty now as it replays in his mind. A dream of meeting oneself, in a dark room at the end of the corridor. Not a twin, a doppelgänger, a reflection; no one else but him, as he is now, will find himself there, wherever “there” is. He doesn’t know if it happens before or after he dies, but he knows it will happen soon.

 

This time he knows he’s dreaming, without a doubt, even before anything unusual happens that would give it away. He’s sitting in a bar, the same where he’s met with Roger on his first night in Buenos Aires. The very same spot; he can see the small stage at the familiar angle. Everything is as he remembers, the maudlin song and the woman in a blue sequinned dress, the mirror and the magician.

No, wait. The magician is not the dark-haired man. It’s a small boy, dressed in a black suit, blond hair neatly combed back. A crude papier-mâché mask obscures his face; almost featureless, an uneven white oval with a large, pointy nose and a twig sticking absurdly out of the forehead. No eyeholes. Phillip wonders how can the boy see; he doesn’t seem to have any trouble moving about. The girl calls for volunteers, and the boy raises his arm, points from one person in the audience to another, eenie, meenie, miney, mo, until his finger lands on Jeffries, who at the same moment gets up and pushes past the crowd to the front; despite the lucidity, he can’t control it. The boy takes his hand as he climbs up onto the stage, and he feels a sting of static, and a shiver runs through his body as he is led up to the mirror. Gripped by a sudden fear, he turns around helplessly, towards the woman, as if to plead for this to stop, to not let him be taken away – but the woman is gone. In her place there is a man, wearing the same mask – no, it’s not a mask, there’s just a thick layer of white paint plastered over his face, and the long, sharp nose, and for a moment, absent-mindedly, Phillip tries to figure out if it’s a fake one, or the man’s own, like a witch’s in an old folktale, one of those that seem too disturbing for a bedtime story. The man throws his head back and laughs, and jumps up into the air, and the lights go out, and Phillip wakes up in cold sweat, his heart pounding in his chest, the man’s rasped laughter still echoing in his ears, and an afterimage of the disfigured mask-face blinking away in the dark.

 

iii.

He explains as much as he can, in that last report he writes. He isn’t quite sure how much of it would make sense to Gordon or anyone else, how much of it makes sense outside of his own head, but it’s what he’s got, and it’s the sort of things that are hard to put into words. He had thought he will tell the whole story when he comes back, but somewhere along the way the ‘when’ started looking more and more like an ‘if’, and he might never even get the chance to pass on another message, so he should say as much as he can. There’s quite a few pages of it by the end, names and places, conversations, conjectures and theories. He reads it again from the beginning and it sounds like gibberish, even to him, so he goes to the bathroom, takes a lighter out of his pockets and puts the flame to the paper, watching it curl up and blacken and fall as ash into the sink.

He tries again. Facts only, to begin with, retracing his own steps, from an unsolved murder case on the outskirts of Las Vegas to a meeting held three days ago in a farmhouse in the Pampas, all the previously left out details to connect the two into one story. That’s already enough to classify this operation as a Blue Rose case, instead of simply an organized crime sting – as if there was ever any doubt about it at all. And he could just as well end with that; he doesn’t _know_ anything more, the rest is just speculation. Can’t really say more until he finds out who _she_ is. _Several times they have mentioned a woman named Judy_ , he writes. _I’m yet to meet her_.

 

“Do you have, uh – miss Judy staying here, by any chance?” he asks, just in case it’s a real name – or not necessarily real, but one being used. He has to mask his surprise when after a brief pause the clerk nods and hands him a plain white envelope.

“This is for you,” he says cheerily. “ _La señorita_ – the young lady, she left it for you.”

Jeffries stares at the receptionist for a moment, and then down at the envelope, his name written across it, no mistake; he snatches it quickly from the man’s hands and turns around, like he might spot someone spying on him from behind the potted palms and araucarias. He flashes a false, nervous smile at the bellhop coming to pick up his luggage, and gives half-hearted, mumbled answers to his small talk as he’s led to his room. Only when he’s alone, with the door locked behind him, he opens the envelope. Inside there’s a postcard, dog-eared and creased: _Greetings from SEATTLE!_ ; he turns it around. A street address, written out in neat, angular letters. He hesitates.

He’d fancy a stiff drink, but he’d rather stay sharp, too, so eventually he just gets himself a glass of water, and sits down cross-legged on the bed, looking through a sheaf of photocopied book pages he’s taken out of his suitcase.

 _The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not really an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks, "I am I!" though aware all the time that its elements have no true bond; so that the slightest disturbance dissipates the delusion just as a horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers of sand to the earth_.

He can’t focus, he re-reads every sentence over and over, startled and disturbed by each slightest noise from outside his room.

 _Beyond Choronzon we are no longer our Self_. Underlined twice.

He puts the page down, and takes the next one out of the ledger. Copied from the same book, a simple symbol – and clipped next to it, an old photo from Carl Rodd’s file. An identical pattern of tree small triangles, like a radiation warning sign. The next page starts halfway through a paragraph.

… _she guardeth the Abyss. And in her is a perfect purity of that which is above, yet she is sent as the Redeemer to them that are below. For there is no other way into the Supernal mystery but through her and the Beast on which she rideth_.

And then a cut-out from somewhere else:

 _Let him look upon the cup whose blood is mingled therein, for the wine of the cup is the blood of the saints. Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon, the Mother of Abominations_ …

One piece of paper after another, spread out in front of him like a map, torn up into jigsaw puzzle pieces. He leans back against the headboard, as if looking at them from half a meter further could suddenly reveal some hidden design. He hears footsteps coming closer down the corridor, and he springs up immediately, reaching for his gun, loaded and ready on the bedside table. But they pass by, someone just walking to their room, and he relaxes slightly, with a deep sigh. It’s gonna be a long night.

He’s thought of moving again, at first, when he saw his name on that envelope, waiting for him already, and he couldn’t remember ever telling anyone he was coming here. But then he figured there’s no point; if she found him once, she’d probably find him again, whoever _she_ is. What did the receptionist say? _La señorita. The young lady_. That doesn’t sound so scary, does it?


	10. my mistress abandoned heaven, abandoned Earth, and descended to the underworld

i.

_From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below._

He runs a finger down the notch carved in the bed frame. It appears fresh, but then again all six of them do; six days, not enough for the wood to darken and gather dust. Six days since he’s moved in here. Doesn’t feel right. Nothing does anymore, as if time itself was losing cohesion, perpetually changing, running fast for a while and then suddenly so thick and sluggish it almost seems to stop. The sixth mark, did he make it yesterday or just this morning? He can’t tell. It doesn’t work. Maybe he should’ve been making tapes, like Cooper always used to do.

Six days, more or less. Six days holed up in here, barely leaving his room. Wondering, who’ll find him first? Roger? The FBI? That’s nothing; they can’t do nothing to him that he’d care about. Some cartel goons? Well, what’s the worst that could happen? A slow and painful death isn’t number one on the wish list, but as he has discovered, there’s nothing, _nothing_ that scares him more than her, because he still doesn’t know a first thing about her, beyond whispers and rumours and ideas he can barely formulate. But he’s waiting for her, that’s why he’s here, holding out until she finds him before anyone else does; and he has no idea what to prepare himself for. He still has the postcard from Seattle, he turns it around in his fingers. An invitation, a temptation he keeps resisting, not out of reason or through some admirable feat of the will, but simply because he’s so god damn scared, and this time it’s stronger than the need for an answer. He knows he’ll find it there, what he’s been looking for all those years, and now he can’t make himself face it, to make that final move. And so, Muhammad’s waiting for the mountain to come to him. And just like in that old saying, he knows he will eventually have to go to the mountain himself.

 

“Mr. Jeffries?”

Must’ve drifted off again. He looks up sharply, suddenly snapped back into reality, and notices the waiter, setting a tray on his table – the usual: eggs, coffee, the morning paper – and hovering there, waiting for his presence to be acknowledged.

“Yes?”

“There was a phone call for you. Some gentleman – he didn’t leave his name. He asked for you to call this number when you wake up,” he says, handing Jeffries a piece of paper torn out from a notepad, an unfamiliar number scrawled across it.

“Thank you. I’ll phone later from my room.”

“As you wish, Mister.”

He struggles to swallow the food, with a cold panicky feeling clenching his gut. He checks and rechecks the date on the newspaper, comparing it with the collected scraps he’s kept in his wallet ever since he’s lost track with the tally marks. Day after day, none missing or doubled, and yet something feels wrong; but it must be just him.

He goes to his room to make the call; someone picks up, but doesn’t speak. There’s only a noise in the background, almost below the threshold of human hearing, it makes his head ache and his stomach turn. He feels sick. And then, just as he’s about to hang up, a voice speaks at last, and suddenly everything clicks into place, and he knows he can’t wait any longer. He feels like a cartoon character who’s run off the edge of a cliff, and for a moment was still shuffling his feet, suspended impossibly in mid-air until he looked down, until the sudden realization weighed down on him and he plunged to his death.

He looks down. There’s nowhere else to go; it’s his turn, his move, another step to take, the last one, right off the edge. On a sudden impulse he flicks his pocket knife open and carves out a message on the wall – a single word, like he needs to leave a mark, or a clue in case he doesn’t come back.

 

ii.

No, but that wasn’t enough for last words; there’s something else left to say, not about the case, just – personally. Gordon will no doubt ask him to report what he’s found out, ever since he last made contact; will ask him to explain himself, but he doesn’t give a damn about that. Duty is a meaningless concept, now more than ever. And it’s not what he’s calling for, is it? He’s calling because he never really said goodbye. In the end, on that last morning, he said: _I’ll see you again, okay?,_ and back then, he believed it. Back then, it seemed obvious, or at least possible. Now it’s not, and it doesn’t feel right to leave Gordon hanging. He dials the number, and counts the seconds ticking by until Gordon picks up and speaks, and for a moment he’s quiet, as words catch in his throat. He wants to hang up, suddenly unsure if he’s got it in him, if he can bear having this conversation.

“Gordon? It’s me,” he finally manages to choke out.

“Phillip?” the trembling note in Gordon’s voice passes through his body like a shiver. “What’s going on down there? We haven’t heard from you in weeks!”

“Gordon...” he interrupts. “Please.” _Please. No questions._ Again, silence falls between them; only the whirring of the air-con, stirring up stale air, fills his ears. He closes his eyes and swallows hard. “You know, I once thought I wouldn’t want, or need, to see you again, but… I wish I could.”

“What do you mean? What’s happening? Are you in danger? Are you hiding from someone? We’ll pull you out. I can arrange –” Gordon’s voice rises louder with the barrage of questions, as he forgets to keep it down, as he’s too agitated to care about that.

“I’m afraid it’s not possible,” Phillip says with a weak smile. “I just wanted to say… goodbye, Gordon.”

“No. No –”

“Please, say it back. Do it for me. Say ‘goodbye’.”

“I love you,” Gordon says instead, and Phillip hangs up, and then he yanks the cord out of the wall socket, so that the phone doesn’t ring again, whoever it might be on the other end.

 

 _With the good divine powers, she went on her way_.

He says it to himself, reciting words in his head, repeating them like a prayer, like a mantra. He remembers everything he’s read that matters.

He checks that his gun is loaded before holstering it. Flicks his switchblade open a couple of times, weights it in his hand, and then, satisfied, closes it and puts it in his pocket. Counts the cash in his wallet – there’s less of it than the newspaper clippings, but he shouldn’t need more. Takes out the envelope from his breast pocket, once again looks at the postcard inside, the skyline of Seattle and the address written on the reverse, and puts it back; smoothens down his jacket, runs a hand through his hair and finally leaves the room.

 _Father_ _Enlil, don't let anyone kill your daughter in the underworld_ , he thinks as he goes downstairs to the reception to call himself a taxi.

He has asked the driver to park at the other end of the road, and walked the rest of the way. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it wasn’t this. The place is deserted, except for a few kids playing on the street; he tells them to get lost, and they run away when they see him pull his gun out, but then he can hear them coming closer again, chattering excitedly in hushed voices behind his back as he pushes the door open.

_“Open up, doorman, open up. I am all alone and I want to come in.”_

The house is a ruin, an empty shell with crumbling walls. A layer of dust and flaking off paint and plaster covers the remnants of broken furniture like snow on the mountaintops. He checks room after room, and eventually comes out onto the patio, overgrown with weeds and littered with trash. But there’s a path cleared up leading to one corner, and an opened hatch in the ground, revealing a dark shaft, like an entrance to the sewers. He climbs down the metal rungs and finds himself in a large tunnel, cold but dry, laid with red brick ceiling to floor. He flicks on a lighter, and waits for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light.

_“Who are you?" "I am_ _Inanna going to the east.”_

There’s no light or sound coming from anywhere, so he picks a direction at random. He tries to tread lightly, carefully, but his steps still echo between the walls of the winding passageway. He wonders if he should go back, if there is anything to be found here. Maybe he should’ve gone the other way. Maybe he wasn’t meant to come down here at all.

_“If you are_ _Inanna going to the east, why have you travelled to the land of no return? How did you set your heart on the road whose traveller never returns?”_

He’s almost decided to turn back when he sees the flame glint off something on the floor. He walks up to it carefully, and crouches down, holding out the lighter.

_“What is this?”_

At his feet there’s a small wooden bowl, and in it lies a golden signet ring. He picks it up to the light, examining it. A large green stone, a symbol carved into it that he doesn’t recognize, although he feels like he’s seen it before, or something similar to it. He looks around, peering through the dark, but sees no one. Whoever has left it here, hidden and yet put out to be found, must be gone by now. Phillip is sure this is what he was brought here for, although he can’t fathom what it means. But it feels important, he certainly shouldn’t lose it. He tries it on; it fits his finger as if it was made for him.

_“Be satisfied,_ _Inanna, a divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled.”_

 

iii.

He still remembers the words, although they don’t matter; only the intent, and the pain, and there will be plenty of both to go around. He checks that the door is locked, pulls his clothes off and sits down cross-legged on the bed. There’s a half-finished bottle of vodka on the nightstand; he takes a big, stinging swig, pours some over his forearm and the old pocket knife and downs the rest, and then passes the blade over the flame of a lighter, and waits for the alcohol to burn out – that’s as clean as it gets. He intones the words in a low voice, through gritted teeth, as he presses the knife against his skin and begins to draw small, criss-crossing lines, a pattern of interlocking triangles. _The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon._ An act of sympathetic magic, waiting for the world to split open and bleed and reveal what’s under the surface. If it’s to happen anyway, he’ll be damned if it doesn’t happen on his terms, when he wants it to, by his own hand; as far as he can tell, it’s the only semblance of freedom that he has left. But it doesn’t work like that, it never works, and he briefly toys with the idea of cutting deeper, but he’s come too far to end it now, he can’t die until he knows what’s on the other side – it’s the only thing stopping him now. He staggers to the bathroom to bandage his arm, giddy from the blood loss and booze, and then comes back into the room, and drops onto the bed.

 _The_ _Anunna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her – it was the look of death_.

 

A knocking on the door, insistent, wakes him up. His head’s splitting, but his arm doesn’t hurt anymore, it’s gone numb, he can barely move it. It doesn’t matter. He tries to get up and his legs give out under him. He finally manages to drag himself to the door and opens it just a crack, and sees an old woman in a maid’s uniform, staring at him expectantly.

“Come to change your towels, sir.” Phillip closes his eyes, and then opens them again, refocusing on the woman.

“Can you get me breakfast?” He’s suddenly aware of how hungry he is. For how long has he been sleeping? When was the last time he’s eaten anything?

“It’s almost four in the afternoon, sir.”

“Yeah, whatever. Look.” He closes the door, rifles through his suitcase, fishes out the last wad of banknotes he has there, and picks much more than needed. He opens the door again and shoves them into the maid’s hand.

“That’s for getting’ me somethin’ to eat, for the bother, and for never knockin’ on my door again after that. Deal?” She nods, a little sheepishly. Phillip glances over his shoulder, at the bundled-up, bloodied mess on the bed.

“I’ll take fresh sheets, too,” he adds.

 

_My daughter craved the great heaven and she craved the great below as well._ _Inanna craved the great heaven and she craved the great below as well._

Be patient, he tells himself, it won’t be long. It will soon be over. There’s nothing left but to wait. No running away now, but he won’t even try. God, just let it be soon. He sits down on the edge of the bed, showered, clean-shaven, dressed up, like he’s ready to go out. It seemed right. Makes him feel a little better, a little more in control. And then he thinks about how they dress up corpses for a funeral all nice and pretty too, and unfortunately that feels a bit more apt.

_The divine powers of the underworld are divine powers which should not be craved, for whoever gets them must remain in the underworld. Who, having got to that place, could then expect to come up again?_

Just let it be soon. Please, let it be soon. Can’t stand no more waiting.

 

He could feel it coming, gathering like clouds on the horizon, damn, he prayed for it to come, and yet it still comes as a shock, and some primal instinct still kicks in, to run, to scream, to beg, _not yet, please, not now, let me have another day, another hour, another minute_. Is it his vision blurring, is it his mind conjuring up this image, or does the room really begin to change around him? It looks as if an artist dipped a brush into a painting, not yet dried out, and gave it a swirl; the dusty pink wall, the chest of drawers, the chair next to it, they smear, smudge, curl into a whirlpool of shapes stretched out into lines of individual colours; and in the bullseye, something like a black hole grows larger and larger, and he sees something move on the other side. He closes his eyes involuntarily, but then forces them open, slides from the bed and stands up, weak in the knees, and takes a few uncertain steps towards the vortex. There’s a sensation of the whole world shifting, he can’t even tell if he’s falling or still standing. A bright light, electric, hurting his eyes, but he makes himself look. He is somewhere else now, he sees a dark corridor, a figure approaching, and another, moving towards him, bedraggled, dirty, whites of the eyes flashing in faces like soot, like burnt wood, blackened and cracked.

 _They accept no pleasant gifts. They never enjoy the pleasures of the marital embrace, never have any sweet children to kiss. They tear away the wife from a man's embrace. They snatch the son from a man's knee_.

No way out, too late for that. He can’t go back, so he’ll go on. One more step.

 _Holy Ereshkigal, sweet is thy praise_ , he mouths soundlessly as he crosses the threshold.


	11. but it’s not a real place

i.

A slip and a fall, faster and faster, for longer than it seems possible. Sparks filling his vision, rushing too quick to see them clear, the world turned into a smudge of maybes instead of fixed points. A jolt and it all comes into focus, every particle of dust distinct, and it feels like seeing the atoms themselves, and he can hear them spin and slowly fall to the ground, grinding against the molecules of air with this white noise, unbearably loud, whizzing in his ears, penetrating, every nerve in his body a reverberating conduit, and he wants to scream but he’s forgotten how to, and everything blurs again – black and white, then red, then purple like a bruise –

A movement performed without his will or consciousness; residual life, like the last twitch of a body after the head’s been cut off. A place, known/unknown. A long dark corridor, bare walls laid with a faded floral wallpaper, dusty wooden floorboards. On the far end, a shaft of light cast from an open door, a faint sallow glow, and muffled voices. Everything’s already familiar, as if seen before, perhaps done before, in endless repetitions. Shadows of someone moving there, a scene remembered from a dozen dreams or nightmares, but this time he won’t turn around and run; he follows. He’ll finally know what’s at the end, even if it’s the last thing he’ll ever see or do; it’s the only thing worth holding on to.

How many times has he been here, in this room above the convenience store?

(How does he know that there is a convenience store downstairs? He’s never been there. But the knowledge is there, indisputable, the way you just know things in dreams, when you enter in the middle of the story, but you know you must go through the red door, and inside you’ll find your childhood home, and the strange woman by the kitchen table is your mother, even if she wears someone else’s face.)

For how long? Two years can pass like two days, twenty years could last exactly that and more; he’ll find that out for sure not long from now. How can he tell, then?

Something is happening to him. A flicker, back and forth, between something and nothing. He didn’t know what “nothing” means before; he would’ve imagined blackness or whiteness, but these are colours too, and this is more than blindness, a part of him taken away as if it was never there. He would’ve thought about floating or stillness or freefall, but these are something-concepts, of space and movement, and in the nothingness, there is no up or down, no forwards or backwards, not enough of him left to act out these motions. There’s nothing, and then, after a long time (time always goes last, after space and action are long gone, there is still time, immeasurable, and thus infinite, for as long as you’re awake) there’s something, and it makes him long for the nothing again.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only a different hue of darkness, and a faceless/face-like face, somehow familiar, forever alien and unknown – there is no understanding, no revelation. Only the void, seconds stretched to aeons, everything he is stretched out like a rubber band until it snaps back into shape or breaks. One glorious, ecstatic moment in which he can see everything, only to forget it all, standing in the circle of things wearing human faces like pale misshapen masks. Standing in the corner of a room, as if there really were little men inside the TV box and he was one of them, looking out through thick glass at the giants who watch him in silence for hours, and then go on with their existence, barely sparing him a second glance.

 

A sort of awareness comes slowly, a hazy remembering that in some form there is still a body, living, breathing, moving. He puts a hand up to his chest, like he wants to make sure he’s still alive, feeling it rising and falling in an uneven rhythm, and the thumping of his heart underneath the skin and bone; and then he lets that hand wander, climb up to touch the little golden cross hanging from his neck, like in a prayer, to God, if he’s somewhere out there, watching, listening, or to something else it might represent – something familiar, like home, like a lifetime ago. _Please, let me go back_ , he whispers, closing his eyes; it doesn’t stop the tears, they run down his cheeks, fall and soak into the material of his shirt. _I want to go back. Please, take me back_. He sinks down to his knees, this is no place and time to be ashamed to cry and beg and he’d do anything it takes.

It’s like the stages of grief but they’re all mixed up, and he doesn’t know how many more there will be or how they’ll look like, but eventually one ends and another begins, and he picks himself up, from the sobbing mess on the floor back again to some kind of grim determination, unfounded but unshakeable, to go on until he finds a way. He walks headlong, still thinking of a way back, he has to get out, has to tell them, he can almost imagine it happening and then –

And then he walks out of the elevator in a hotel in Buenos Aires, and he walks out of the elevator in the FBI quarters in Philadelphia, and he goes down the corridor, and he goes down the corridor, no, something’s wrong – echoing, splitting – he runs down the stairs, he bursts into their old office and then stops dead in his tracks, suddenly uncertain. It’s different than he recalls it, maybe the desks were rearranged? And _he_ is there, a man he’s seen in that other place, although he looks younger, so maybe not him – who is he? Is this really here or is it still back _there_ , waking up from one nightmare into another? He tries to explain everything but his thoughts loose coherence, words escape him and memories elude him, coming back only in broken-up pieces, disjointed, and then he feels himself ripped away violently, falling back into himself, a collision, a blast, a blinding light and searing pain, his own screaming and someone else’s voice. He’s reaching out, teetering on the edge; if only someone took his hand, pulled him through, didn’t let him slip away again. He looks around and he sees the hotel staircase, the maid and the bellhop, and he looks around and he sees a staircase, and two men approaching him, slowly, like figures in a nightmare who barely seem to move but you can never outrun them, they are coming, they are coming, shadows, see-through, superimposed over his vision, they are coming... _Ayúdame_ , cries out the bellhop; _help me_ , Jeffries thinks, his last thought before he falls back into the dark.

 

He’s conscious, but he can’t move, like he’s paralysed, and as time ticks by a gnawing fear sets in: will he just lie here until he dies? Maybe he’s not even here anymore, non-existent, with phantom limbs and phantom pain, without it he’d forget he’s ever had a body at all. Maybe he’s something else now; he can’t see himself or where he is, and maybe he should be thankful for that. He imagines pale, misshapen flesh, like a deep sea creature, useless eyes overgrowing with skin like scar tissue, but seeing everything, swimming in cold blackness.

How long has he been here? Seems like forever, from ever since he was born up until eternity. Who is he? He holds on to a name, and a distant lifetime, knowing it would be easier to let go. What is he? What he’s always been; yes, he had a body once, a body that lives and breathes and eats and sleeps and feels, but that memory is just a splinter of something shattered, a piece of debris from a shipwreck, drifting away into the open sea to come back with the waves when the sun sets. In time, he’ll build himself again from these scraps – a little different, maybe, bits put in backwards; always the same.

He was saved, she saved him. Took his hands, scuffed to the bone from tearing at the walls that closed in around him. Embraced him, opened him up, hollowed him out to be filled up with their voices, their presence. It’s better this way. There is a purpose, sometimes, and it cannot be disobeyed, even as it is rarely understood. Sometimes they just leave him be, and he simply is. Like a child, sitting on a beach, sifting through the flotsam, picking out seashells and putting them to his ear to hear the hum of the ocean, trapped in the twisted porcelain labyrinth. Collecting things washed up on the shore, glittering rocks; taking the shimmering silver water in his hands and it’s suddenly murky blue, let it go – he can only watch, mesmerized by the glimmer of reflected moonlight, flashing in afterimages after he looks away. He builds castles to see them disappear when the tide comes; he will start over, and over, and over. It’s all he has left, writing messages in the sand, listening to the hidden meanings in the background noise of the universe. All in all, it could have been worse. He was saved. He’s grateful. He goes on.

 

ii.

Gordon says something along the lines of “unbelievable”, and “how could it have happened”, and it’s a lie, the biggest one of all. He isn’t sure if he can convince everyone around, but he’s pretty damn sure that he can’t convince himself. He has long known that this, or something like this, would happen sooner or later; he still finds himself so rattled. He can tell himself whatever he wants – _this is too important, this is bigger than any of us_ – however much he wants – _we put ourselves on the line_ – but at the end of day, he realizes he was never ready to accept the consequences he had thought he was prepared for. He can tell himself that losing someone is a part of the equation, but even as he has been calculating the odds, did he ever really consider it? Did he consider it or not, every step of the way? Would it be worse if he did, or if he didn’t? Does it even matter?

Really, he should’ve expected Phil to be the first one to go down, and yet through some enormous denial, in this equation he never did take him into account. And now his friend, lover, colleague, whatever they’ve been throughout the years, whatever you might call it, is gone; his partner has become a case himself, a name on a manila folder, investigation open. Disappeared, vanished without leaving a trace save for that burned-out silhouette, like an atomic blast shadow, on the main staircase of the Palm Deluxe hotel.

(The manager has eventually had a new wallpaper laid; it kept showing through the paint.)

He came back, of course, if only for a brief moment. Not long after another year has ended, and after one too long taskforce supervisory meeting with Milford, when Gordon has had too much to drink and has said too much of what’s weighing on his heart, and he was forced to acknowledge that special agent Phillip Jeffries should not only be officially declared missing in action, but also they’ve probably lost him for good – with a hint of dark irony worthy of the kind of contrarian he always was, Phillip Jeffries has showed up, as if to prove Gordon wrong; he’d never have let anyone write him off too easily.

He comes back but it’s strange and confusing and makes Gordon uneasy, and there’s so many questions and confessions and touches that he has to restrain himself from in front of the others, He would’ve been so deliriously happy if he didn’t feel so damn anxious, listening to Phillip talk and trying to make some sense out of it. And then, so terrifyingly simply and suddenly, he is gone again, as if he was never there at all. Somehow, this time Gordon finds it easier to believe it was final, as he relives the regret and guilt of two years back. There was nothing he could’ve done, was there? Was there?

And then others follow: Chet, Coop. _We put ourselves on the line_ – only he never did, there was always someone who did that for him. He’s never directly forced them to, and he never did a thing to stop them. And he can talk all he wants about shouldering the burden of command, the hardship of a decision, the responsibility of power; but it’s not the same. And he can talk all he wants about greater good, but is it worth it?

Of course it is. That’s what he tells himself, at least.

Everyone gone, one by one, Sam, Diane, even Milford and Briggs; only Albert’s still there. You can keep your secret a secret, but can you keep secret the fact that you’re keeping a secret? Gordon sometimes wonders if everything he knows shows on his face, if that’s what he can see reflected in Albert’s resentful suspicion – an echo, a subliminal response.

 

iii.

Truth be told, Albert has long known that this, or something like this, would happen sooner or later. It isn’t his fault, of course, but it sure feels as if he could and should have done _something_. He’s known Cooper long and well enough by now to know that this kid – the golden boy, top of the class, all pretty face and brilliant mind and no damn sense of self-preservation – was in well over his head. He’s known Cole long and well enough to not trust him to take care of his men, and yet he made that mistake.

And now Cooper is gone, and Albert finds himself thinking about Jeffries. Maybe in a year or two, Cooper will also walk into the office like a goddamn miracle in the flesh, wearing the same suit and not a day older, and Albert sure as hell won’t let him slip away again.

 

A streetlight flickers and goes off, and a phone rings in the booth on the corner. By now Albert has had many reasons to believe in ghosts, but he refuses to give them the satisfaction; and as for fate and cosmic paths laid out for us mere mortals – Coop used to believe in such things, and followed the mysterious coils of the universe straight into non-existence; Albert likes to think he’s a little more sensible.

Yeah, he picks up the damn phone.

“Hello, Albert,” a voice speaks before he has a chance to say anything. “Long time no see.”

“You’re supposed to say that when you actually see someone,” Albert mutters gruffly, an automatic response, no matter how taken aback he is. Maybe nothing can shock him dumb anymore.

“Oh, but I am seein’ you. Right now.”

He shivers involuntarily, and it’s more than just a stray icy raindrop from his collar trickling down his neck. He leans heavily against the wall of the booth. He knows that voice, of course, he has recognized it straight away – and he knows it’s impossible. Bloody unlikely, at least. He needs a confirmation that he’s wrong.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, _come on_ , Albert.”

Albert pinches the bridge of his nose, and takes a deep, shaky breath.

“Okay. I’m not in the mood for magic tricks. Where the hell are you? Actually, while we’re at it, if you’re still alive, where the hell have you been all these years? And what are you calling me for now?”

Jeffries isn’t sure when or how he’s discovered that what he does ripples out into the world; he still isn’t sure if everything he does comes from him, if there isn’t anyone up there pulling the strings, his strings, every step he takes is a dance of a marionette; but there’s an illusion of will for as long as nothing’s stopping his hand, an illusion of a plan for as long as there’s ideas to pluck out of thin air. That’s how it’s always worked, why should it be any different now?

“I need somethin’ from you. It’s important. It concerns Cooper.” _‘His blood turned to ice’ always sounded to Albert like low-grade poetic nonsense, but if that’s not literally how it feels_ – “He’s gone missin’.” _No, shit. But how do you know that?_ This is some joke, a horrific joke, or a ruse. This might be the best chance he will ever have –

“What do you need?”

You can keep your secret a secret, but can you keep secret the fact that you’re keeping a secret? He sometimes wonders if Gordon can somehow tell that he’s keeping something from him. But he’s never confronted him, so Albert assumes he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. It seems almost cruel, in a way, to accuse him of the latter, and yet he sometimes can’t help it.

 

iv.

The phone by Gordon’s bedside chimes, must’ve been about eight rings before it goes quiet, but he’s still fast asleep. In his dream, he walks down a street, and he’s being followed by a woman, but when he turns around, he doesn’t see her, only her reflection in the windows. She’s really quite beautiful, looks a bit like Monica Bellucci, he notes with small glee, but he knows she’s really someone else – the way you just know things in dreams, when you enter in the middle of the story but you know you have to go through the red door, and inside you’ll find your childhood home, and there is a strange creature in the back garden, a deer, malformed and translucent, its antlers soft and gelatinous like the rami of an axolotl, you know that without touching it, you dare not come close enough to touch it because you know it’s came here for you –

– and it looks at him, one eye an electric blue spark and the other a black hole, and throbbing at the back of Gordon’s head is a malformed recognition, but just as things can be revealed in dreams, they can be obscured and quickly forgotten. He wakes up with an inexplicable sadness, a heaviness in his heart, and he ascribes it to the same reason as every morning, without realizing how spot on that is this time; the same reason as every morning for the past two years or so. Losing Phillip was bad enough to begin with, but it’s only became worse now, after his reappearance, a brief glimmer of false hope, and then an inkling of what might’ve happened to him, and Gordon thinks he would’ve preferred not to know.

 

He looks in a mirror, tired eyes staring back at him. He remembers what Phillip has told him, years back, just before he left; how he used to play chicken with his own reflection, to see who looks away first. He thinks about glaring dead ahead, fixed on a target, rushing headlong to the other side. He thinks of that now, of not turning away, of breaking through the looking glass, reaching for whatever’s waiting for him out there. He remembers Phillip in those final days, imagines him swapping places with his mirror twin, stepping out of the bathroom into God knows where, and the thing living in his house since then, made of glass and silver, if you touch it it’s cold and hard and if you push it, it falls and breaks down, a thousand pieces and seven years of bad luck. It’s been more than that now and he still thinks about Jeffries, about how there was ever only one, no changelings, no impostors, the one posing for a class photo with his tie askew and a hand brushing in passing against Gordon’s thigh, and the one sleeping in his arms, and the one with a bright spark in his eye even after he’s stayed up all night, like he could never be worn down, forever young and sharp and always coming out on top, and the one calling one last time for a choked-up goodbye before jumping off that cliff and sinking like a stone, they were all one and the same, and Gordon has kept convincing himself otherwise ‘cause it was simpler than the truth, and then he has told himself that Jeffries was born doomed ‘cause it was easier than admitting to a fault. He thinks of all that now, and he looks away first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's it. still not sure if I'm happy with it, but who cares? I'm tired of it, that much I'm sure of.
> 
> big thanks to the trash can chat group for continued support, encouragement and headcanons. xx


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